HOW FARM TENANTS LIVE 


| Dickey and Branson 


THE LIBRARY OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF 
NORTH CAROLINA 


THE COLLECTION OF 
NORTH CAROLINIANA 


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UNIveRSITY OF NorTH CAROLINA 
_ EXTENSION BULLETIN 


~HOW FARM TENANTS LIVE 
i _ By J. A. DICKEY and E. C. BRANSON 


A SOCIAL-ECONOMIC SURVEY IN PN ean 1 
CHATHAM COUNTY,N. C. ) 


aN 
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS Re ER I 
CHAPEL HILL, N. C. Fe MRS PRI tao ca 
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WHO WILL SOLVE THIS PROBLEM? 


Our tenant farmers—courageous, honest, patient 
and long-suffering—when shall they see light? When 
shall their burdens be lifted? In the spring time they 
go forth, and with our brothers in black set their 
hands to the plow. They bend their backs to the 
burden, and when the frost falls they have added 
$1,000,000,000 to the wealth of the world. But small, 
indeed, is their share and meager their recompense. 
Every two years, according to the government census, 
they move from one place to another. 


They build no homes, they live in rude huts, no 
flowers about their dwellings, no trees to shade them 
from the sun, consumed by the summer’s heat and 
chilled by the winter’s cold, no lawns about their 
houses, no garden fences; and with the accursed cot- 
ton plant crowding the very threshold of their rude 
dwellings and thrusting its limbs into their very 
windows, their lot is indeed pitiable. 


Their sons and daughters come to manhood and 
womanhood, desert the farms and are lost in some 
distant community. Finally, when their pilgrimage 
is over, they are laid to rest in the rude churchyards 
of the country, others take their places and continue 
the fight. They have established no permanent 
homes, their kith and kin are scattered far and wide, 
and the places that knew them once know them no’ 
more forever. 


I have no word of criticism for men like these. I 
know them, I have lived among them. I sprang from 
them. Who will lead these men out of the wilderness 
of their troubles? Men whom they elevate to high 
offices in the state and nation are ever ready to teach 
them politics, but they are not prepared to help them 
solve their problems of life. A fearful responsibility 
rests at this time upon men in authority and men 
in high offices. Will they heed it?—Joseph T. 

Holleman. 


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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I 
EMRE UTON (Tate UME Rty fest ile iy) Gal Ok NaN Ms Neves an RUN see 
PRY Etie MECN iW Let Meee aL Webs ANT rset MSN YS hy nital ss Sela ss fol lelha ‘ch 8 auGrior'e Rorme bak nialior/s taieeliay 7 
A CLosz-uP STUDY OF JOHN SMITH, TENANT...........00-000- MN, 
SRN ANOT AREA SURVEMEDM Mull cid vid adage we elo a Balu NY ie 
LIVING ON TWENTY-THREE CENTS A DAY... 0.0.00... ccc eee eens’ Pinay ff 
FARM CLASSES: OWNERS, RENTERS, AND CROPPERS.........-.24- PA he 
WHat THEY OWN AND THE MONEY THEY HANDLE...... Bat altay ploy sts tk 14 
feat Ne tame MNF VSL ASS a a) 2/104 VRE MALE ANIL 8) Bi Vella a bo! '2's uate Qiieiln/ ent leg et Vaal a V9 . 15 
RIOR 18 /.1:c (2c nutri lnaie Mim ceu lay itary ch AT Dl AM Li By 2 any 16 
CASH INCOME LEVELS...... DRS a Taner evs a) afsiierte laa. 4 s,fu, a ghia bs UA EAD pre Wf 
SE) 0 TR Ee Te SR aa RAL oa 19 

B 

II 
THE SOCIAL ESTATE OM "TENANT CLASSES. 200... 4)0e5 paws ce eles 20 
THe Homes THry LIVE IN........... WOM SNE Shan viare aulubd ta taeda alts .. 2d 
PT EMU ON DELETION Sele ura a arc yile oh els ial seis Ween ea h/alalh $ ahead a eae of ahaha 
PemOone AND SCHOO INELUENCES is. ec ee We daivisle ola e's eis ae pa 
CHART—CROPPER LEVELS....... PAINE sad ANU a De Be iS Pt eA i 28 
CHART—RENTER LEVELS...... Laat ary ean eh ioe et ala NAVEEN GDR UND ADU) UH ie e229 
er ARO CRN AN TOUR MAT Oi uille Jieleldis' s Stee ed si PRU NA mig a ally . 30 
CHURCHES AND CHURCH INFLUENCES.....00 00.00 c cee eee Rie atiahy 31 
CHURCH ATTENDANCE AND MEMBERSHIP.............. AVG ie AA 32 
BUNDAY | SCHOOL) ATTENDANOB. . ofl cislb sliced hie cd ais SAD RAH UR 92 
COED ATMO TUR eld all iaila Wal e\'s iahiee vg BS a valavanvere Mba a Lene nviy ay ale ROMPRES hn SS: 
SAE A CORRION GS) ANIX COM PAOTS 010) o.c)iscuig iaigiueel bil wine dele eiaidivs 35 

IIT 
HeLprne TENANTS INTO FARM OWNERSHIP..........0.000% } § 37 
WHO CAN AND WHO CANNOT BE HELPED...........22.0025 YAP $3 
Rete a PO ANDLESS | PAR MERS oil u\ele bib cea a Ma ece ured ales ae TUBS 4 
DELF-HELP AGENCIES AND QUALITIES........... 0050005 AERA AOD 41 
THE PLACE OF LEGISLATION........ Peter teath atrall el era natalia Cal Maire AR) Sad es ty Anes 
OBSTACLES TO HOME AND FARM OWNERSHIP.........020-000- ... 44 
CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS..... MOT eR Udeie) hialaalaichihiol siete mttntG Apu ato alae 46 


ii 
‘iia 


OUR LANDLESS MULTIUDES 


North Carolina has twenty-two million idle 
wilderness acres, a hundred thousand vacant town 
and city lots, and a million three hundred eighty 
thousand landless, homeless people, town and 
country. Almost exactly one-third of our white 
farmers and two-thirds of our negro farmers own 
no land. The people who live in rented dwellings 
in our towns and cities are from two-thirds to 
three-fourths of the various municipal populations. 


These are the people in North Carolina who 
own not an inch of the soil they cultivate nor a 
single shingle in the roofs over their heads. They 
are fifty-two per cent or more than half the 
entire population of the state. 


Enduring social structures cannot be built on 
land-ownership by the few and land-orphanage for 
the many. Civilization is rooted and grounded 
in the home-owning, home-loving, home-defending 
instincts —E. C. Branson. 


INTRODUCTION 


1. The schedule of the North Carolina Club at the University of North 
Carolina in 1921-22 covered the various phases of Home and Farm Owner- 
ship—Town and Country, and week by week the University News Letter 
earried to the press and the people of the state brief summaries of the 
Club reports, discussions and conclusions. The Club Year-Book will soon 
be going into the mails, and in twenty-two chapters will give to the public 
these studies in full detail. 


2. In December 1921 the State Board of Agriculture appointed a State 
Farm Tenancy Commission consisting of B. F. Brown, Chief of the State 
Marketing Bureau, Chairman; Clarence Poe, member of the State Board, 
and editor of the Progressive Farmer; C. C. Taylor of the State College of 
Agriculture and Engineering; W. C. Jackson of the State College for 
Women; and E. C. Branson of the State University. The three state in- 
stitutions named were asked to collaborate with the State and the Federal 
Department of Agriculture and to conduct field studies of farm tenancy 
in three typical farm territories. These surveys were made in the sum- 
mer months of 1922, in compact areas of (1) Edgecombe, a cotton county 
in the Hast, (2) Chatham, a diversified farm county in the mid-state, on 
the edge of the ecotton-tobacco belt, and (3) Madison, a mountain county 
that for fifty years has been developing the evils of tenancy farming in a 
territory almost exclusively white in population. The surveys were under 
the general direction of Dr. C. C. Taylor, who is now summarizing the 
results for the State Tenancy Commission, which in turn will report its 
findings and conclusions to the State Legislature through the State Board 
of Agriculture. 


3. The particular responsibility of the State University in these sur- 
veys was Chatham county which lies within easy distance of the campus. 
The University surveyor was J. A. Dickey of Alamance county which ad- 
joins Chatham. Mr. Dickey is an A. B. graduate of Elon College, an A.M. 
graduate of the University, and during his university year an active mem- 
ber of the North Carolina Club. Both the survey purposes and the farm 
folk surveyed were familiar to Mr. Dickey. He was born and reared on 
an Alamance county farm. All his life he has lived among the farm people 
in the hill country on the edge of the fall line of the state. His courses 
in rural social-economics at the University were directly aimed at his sum- 
mer survey task, and his field work was done with rare insight, sympa- 
thetic understanding, and unfailing tact. Mr. Dickey is now a research 
fellow of the Cornell College of Agriculture, at Ithaca, N. Y. 


4. In keeping with formal resolutions of the Tenancy Commission 
before the survey began, the North Carolina Club at the University has 
used the data assembled in Chatham county by Mr. Dickey for a Year- 
Book chapter on The Social Status of Our Farm Tenants. It is the phase 
of farm tenancy that the Club has been most interested in. We have 
therefore considered the economic data in brief and only as related in the 


6 How Farm TENANTS Live 


largest way to the social estate of John Smith—Tenant. The economic 
summaries and significances of the surveys in the three counties will be 
found in detail in the forthcoming report of Dr. Taylor covering all the 
counties studied and all phases of the study. 

5. The conclusions and recommendations of this particular chapter 
concern Chatham county tenancy in Baldwin and Williams townships, and 
convey to the public the best thinking of the North Carolina Club. Which 
means that we are purposing to relieve our collaborators of responsibility 
for the utterances herein—and possibly, of embarrassment.—E. C. 
BRANSON, Chairman of the Steering Committee, North Carolina Club. 


HOW OUR FARM TENANTS LIVE 
I 
The Money They Live On 


What about marrying on $20 a month—really on $6.00 a month in 
money, the balance of your cash income being held back till the end of the 
year? On a money income of that sort, do you think you’d have the 
nerve to set about establishing a home, sheltering, feeding, clothing, and 
safe-guarding a family in sickness and in health, and giving the children 
a decent chance at life? 

I shoved these questions at a young college graduate on the train the 
other day—a cotton buyer in a flourishing cotton-belt city. 


He looked at me in amazement. Kidding me? said he. Looks like it. 
I’m getting $200 a month, and I can’t get married. I’d be a fool to 
marry on any such income. It couldn’t be done in my town. 

But, said I, this is exactly what fifty-one farmers have had the nerve 
to do in one small corner of a mid-state county in North Carolina. Thirty- 
eight of them are tenants, who handled in 1921 a household average of 
$250.64 in cash in the run of the year or just a little more than $20 a 
month. Thirteen are croppers with a household average of $153.27 in cash 
or a little less than $13 a month. And they are not negro farmers. They 
are white farmers—tenants to be sure, but native born whites of your race 
and mine. 

How in the name of the Holy-Pink-Toed Prophet do they do it? he 
said. By which epithet, I gathered that he had been chumming with Cappy 
Ricks o’nights around the office stove. 

Well, said I, they have no house rent to pay—that’s everywhere free 
in this blessed land of cottontots; and no coal bills, for fire-wood is still 
abundant and free on every farm in North Carolina. Their grocery bills 
are small, because the farm itself furnishes from three-fourths to four- 
fifths of the food they eat—vegetables, milk and butter, poultry and eggs, 
and a little home-raised pork. And then they have various fruits and game 
in season, by grace of their landowning neighbors or the free gift of the 
fields. The landlords want their share of the corn and the ecash-erop 
money, but everything else the tenants produce is freely their own. They 
have plenty to eat and wear, sheer existence considered. It is impossible 
to starve or freeze in the country regions of North Carolina. God Almighty 
made the state to be a paradise for poor folks. 

He came’ back at me promptly. But, said he, they need money for 
shoes and head-wear; they need money for doctors, midwives and dentists, 
for prescriptions and patent medicines at the drug store, for the contribu- 
tion box at the church on Sundays, for taxes and insurance, for gas and 
oil, for chewing tobacco and snuff and a cigar once in a while, for gun 
shells and fishing tackle, for school books, newspapers and victrolas, for 


(7) 


8 How Farm Tenants Live 


movies, ice-cream cones and bottled drinks, for fairs, circuses, and street 
carnivals in the occasional trips to town. 

Sure, I said. And after paying the family bill for bread, bonnets and 
paragoric, how much do you think they have left for social servants like 
teachers, preachers, and doctors, for social institutions like churches, 
schools, and colleges, for state and county treasuries, and for petty self- 
indulgences? 

They couldn’t have much ready money left over for any such purposes 
as these, said he. After paying my room rent, cafeteria charges, haber- 
dashery bills, bootblack and barber fees, pressing-club dues, newspaper 
and magazine subscriptions, and various inescapable incidental expenses, 
I had only $150 left over last year, and the doctors got every cent of that 
before I had any chance to spend it on a good time Christmas. I didn’t 
wind up the year in debt, but I was barely on the safe side of the dead- 
line. I think I did pretty well, better in fact than most of the fellows. 
But as for getting married on $200 a month—nix! I’d be an idiot to 
do it. 

But, I said, on a money average of $20 a month these fifty-one white 
tenant farmers not only kept themselves and their families alive, but 
twenty-five of them were out of debt at the end of the year. And more, 
they have actually accumulated $23,277 in personal property—in work- 
stock, farm implements, household goods and utensils, automobiles, guns, 
and dogs; and their debts all told were only $4,100. Debts counted out, 
they are nearly $20,000 ahead of the game. 

Well, all I’ve got to say, he replied, is that they are some financiers! 
They’ve got more sense than I’ve got. If you are giving me straight 
dope, don’t ever again let anybody talk to you about stupid, lazy tenant 
farmers. 

But say, said he, how do these people live? How do they keep soul 
and body together on an average of thirteen to twenty dollars a month in 
money? What are their standards of living? What are their notions of 
comfort and culture? They are not starved nor even half-starved in body, 
you say, but they must be wholly starved in mind—halt and maimed and 
blind in spirit! What can they look forward to? Can they ever hope to 
be anything but underling farmers, disadvantaged and under-privileged, 
they and their children and their children’s children to the remotest 
generation? 

All of which are tremendously important questions. They concern 
63,487 white farm tenants in North Carolina. With their families they 
number 317,500 souls, or nearly one-fifth of the entire white population of 
the state. Who are these people? Why are they farm tenants instead of 
farm owners? On what level do they live? What are their hopes and 
fears? What chance have they to rise out of farm tenancy into farm 
ownership ? 


How Farm TENANTS Live 9 


A Close-up Study 


John Smith—Tenant, is a piteous figure, as MacNeill’s pen gives him 
to us in the News and Observer. But John Smith, the Wayne county 
tenant who took the first prize for diversified farming, at the state fair 
last year, is quite another story. We know much about this or that tenant 
farmer, but in the South we know almost nothing about our white tenant 
farmers as a class. And landlords know much about the tenant farmer 
as an economic factor in the business of farming, but they know very 
little about him as a social and civie asset or liability in community life 
and commonwealth development. In cold figures we know nearly all there 
is to know about farm tenants the country over—the number, the ratios, 
the types, and the increases or decreases in each state since 1880; and, in 
recent years in certain closely surveyed areas in the South and Middle 
West, cold figures have told us much about their farm practices, their 
labor incomes, and the havoe they work upon soils and farm buildings. 
But we know much less, in most states nearly nothing, about the tenant 
as a human being—his home life, his church and school interests, his 
habits and hopes, and the part he has played in lifting or lowering the 
level of civilization in his home community. We have reckoned him in 
dollars and cents; we have not yet appraised him as a home-maker or as a 
community builder or destroyer in free American democracies. We have 
known very little about him as a citizen and we have cared less—or so 
until very recently in this and other states. 

What we need is a close-up study of the 317,000 souls in the families 
of the white tenants of North Carolina. And it must be a keenly sympa- 
thetic study or we shall fail to understand and interpret aright the facts 
we find. 


The Tenancy Area Surveyed 


In order to supply this need, at least in part, Mr. J. A. Dickey, an 
A.M. graduate of the State University, spent the three summer months of 
1922 in 329 farm homes of Baldwin and Williams townships in the north- . 
east corner of Chatham county. They were the homes of practically all 
the farmers of this small area—the homes of owners and tenants, white 
and black. 

Chatham is a mid-state county situated along the Fall Line, on the 
eastern edge of the Piedmont region of the state. The cotton and tobacco 
counties of the Coastal Plain adjoin it on the east and south, and on the 
north and west lie the grain, hay, and forage counties of the state. It is a 
land of rolling hills, abundant water courses, and rich bottom soils—a 
natural livestock region. The fertility of the soil is attested by the fact 
that in the olden days it was the seat of a slave-holding aristocracy. 
Neither slavery nor tenancy ever flourished in poor soils anywhere in the 
South. There were 729 slave-holding families in Chatham in 1860. Only, 
six counties of the state had more slave-holders and only sixteen contained 
more slaves. Nevertheless there were in Chatham nearly 1800 white 
families who owned no slaves. They outnumbered the slave-owning 


N 


10 How Farm TENANTS LIvE 


families more than two to one.* Many of these non-slave-holding families 
in Chatham owned small farms on the poorer soils of the ridges; some 
were artisans—carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors and the like; 
some were farm laborers getting $75 a year and board—rarely ever more; 
some were renters and others were overseers on the slave plantations; most 
of them were illiterate—the exceptions were few, and all alike belonged 
to a lower social estate. The negroes called them ‘‘pore white trash.’’ 
Today the descendants of these 1800 families are almost entirely the farm 
owners of the county. Their trend has been steadily upward these last 
sixty years. The aristocracy of the old slave plantation died out or moved 
away long years ago. Hardly a vestige of the old social order remains. 
The history of Chatham since. the war, like that of many another remote 
slave county, is the story of a middle class rising slowly and clumsily 
into democratic self-rule. 


The county was long without railroads. Even now the middle and 
upper half of Chatham lacks railroad facilities; and only within the last 
eighteen months are the public roads of the county beginning to attain 
to the standards of modern life. In the remoter corners of Chatham, as in 
Williams and Baldwin townships, country schools are poorly housed and. 
poorly supported. Here the little one-teacher school is still the rule. 
Local school taxes for consolidated schools and transportation trucks are 
only just now being considered. Aside from Bynum, a little cotton mill 
village of forty-odd dwellings in the southeast corner of Baldwin township, 
there are no towns or villages in this area. The farmers are settled in 
solitary dwellings (only three to the square mile) as almost everywhere 
else in the rural South. The thirteen roadside stores, the ten schools, and 
the twelve churches are the centers of country neighborhood life for whites 
and blacks alike. 


Without convenient market facilities, the farms have naturally been de- 
voted in the main to bread-and-meat production for home consumption. 
Cotton and tobacco are the small money crops. Corn, wheat, oats, pota- 
toes, milk and butter, poultry and pork are the abundant staples of ex- 
istence. The farm population is upstanding and sturdy, robust and vigor- 
ous. The signs of degeneracy are rare, and I say this having in mind the 
natives left in the farm regions of the North and East. 


But the money the farmers handle from year to year is too little to 
encourage them to place their schools and local public roads on a basis of 
liberal tax support. The county is an area designed by nature for diversi- 
fied farming and well balanced farm systems, but the farmers of Chatham 
must devote themselves to money crops in larger measures. This funda- 
mental fact cannot be too greatly emphasized in this report. It is the 
outstanding economic necessity revealed in this study. No farm system 
ean be a satisfactory basis for progressive civilization unless it have 


* The ratio of non-slave-holding to slave-holding families was roughly three to 
one in North Carolina as a whole, and in the twelve slave-holding states of the South. 
Of the 126,000 white families in North Carolina in 1860 only 35,000 held slaves; 
and of the 1,273,000 white families in the South only 355,000 families were slave- 
holders. Data abstracted from the 1860 census. 


How Farm Tenants Live ame 


money products in abundant measure. The farmers must have markets 
for their money crops and ready money in circulation far beyond anything 
Mr. Dickey found in the northeast corner of Chatham. Without a larger 
volume of ready money for daily needs, the landowners, tenants, and 
eroppers of the two townships surveyed have a poor chance to keep step 
with the rest of North Carolina. 


Living on 23 Cents a Day Per Person 


The survey figures are startling. The total gross money income of the 
329 farmers of Williams and Baldwin townships in Chatham county in 
1921 was only $144,041, and of this grand total $27,162 was produced by 
work on public roads, bridges and buildings—much of it by work on the 
buildings under erection on the campus of the State University, by casual 
labor at odd jobs in the nearby towns, by state and federal pensions, 
allotments and the like. 

In detail the gross money income figures are as follows: 


Sale of Total Average 

Farm Other Cash Money Per 
ALL FARMS Products Income Income Family 
MP OPAWELOOWRNOTS © oc see ele sok doe $ 72,218 $12,325 $ 84,553 $626.24 
POCO TONOWAGRS 00... Gi. pass we eine eles 18,706 3,002 21,708 529.46 
BOP NMESTO) TENANTS oo. oie ieee es 17,867 8,396 26,263 257.49 
PM WITILO TENRADLS... 6) ee lege sees 8,077 3,439 11,517 225.80 
SUOUPOTIMOIS ke ee a ele Perle le $116,868 $27,162 $144,041 $437.81 


The average per person in these 329 farm families was only 23 cents a 
day! The cash in circulation in the homes of the fifty-one white tenants 
was only twelve cents a day per person, only fourteen cents a day per 
person in the homes of the negro tenants, only thirty-two cents a day per 
person in negro farm-owner homes, and only thirty-four cents a day per 
- person in white farm-owner homes! 

Here certainly is life reduced to its very lowest beens in money. How 
could anybody, black or white, live on less money and live at all? How 
can white tenants on a daily cash income of twelve cents a day per person 
ever buy and pay for farms of their own? They do it—fifty-seven of the 
white farm-owners of this particular territory have done it during the last 
twenty years. And on fourteen cents a day per person, thirty-four negro 
farm renters and croppers have risen into farm ownership during the same 
period. The average cash income of tenants in this area has probably 
been less than fifteen cents a day per person throughout this entire period. 
They do it, but how they do it passes understanding. And moreover they 
have done it\by seif-effort alone. Not one of these ninety-one farm owners, 
of either race, received his land by inheritance, gift, or marriage. 

Can this record be beat in any other state of the Union? This is what 
I have in mind when I say that God Almighty made North Carolina to be 
a paradise for poor folks—that is to say, for the average poor man con- 
tent with merely keeping soul and body together in the country regions. 


12 How Farm TENANTS LiIvE 


But for the poor man who aspires to own his own farm the state is a 
purgatory. If the farm is ever paid for, it must be paid for in pinching 
self-denial, in the field work of his wife and children, and in the lack of 
school advantages, newspapers, magazines, and noble books. How could it 
be otherwise on an average money income of fifteen cents a day per person? 

The figures of average daily cash income on the farms of these two 
townships in Chatham county are a cue to the cash farm incomes of North 
Carolina in general. The averages are larger in the all-cash-crop counties 
of the cotton and tobacco belt proper, at least in exceptional years, but 
all in all our farmers everywhere handle too little money in the run of the 
year; and their surpluses even in the best years are too small to serve as 
any safe basis on which to build a commonwealth. Here is the reason 
why the accumulated personal property of white tenants averages only 
$526 per family, only $426 per white cropper family, only $409 per black 
renter family, and only $123 per black cropper family! 

The same facts explain why the accumulated wealth in farm proper- 
ties—farm land, buildings, livestock and implements alone—was only $567 
per country inhabitant in Chatham county as a whole in 1920; and only 
$684 the state over. 

These are pitiful figures when contrasted with $1,836, the average wealth 
per farm dweller in the United States as a whole, with $7,260 in South 
Dakota, and with $8,113 in Iowa. 

There is too little ready cash in circulation in the country regions of 
North Carolina and too little accumulated wealth. Until both are multi- 
plied many times over, the twelve hundred thousand farm people of North 
Carolina are a mired wheel in our civilization. 

The state as a whole is rich, but our farmers are poor—in Chatham 
and in every other county of North Carolina. 


The farm homes studied by Mr. Dickey were the homes of white farm 
owners, negro farm owners, negro renters and croppers, and white renters 
and croppers. In the main, this chapter is concerned with the 51 white 
renters and croppers. Not that we lack interest in the negro tenants and 
croppers, but because these negro farmers are working out their own sal- 
vation in most amazing fashion—in Chatham just as everywhere else in 
the cotton-belt South, at least in every area where the blacks are thinly 
scattered among white majorities. 


Thus Mr. Dickey’s studies concern a small section of the large problem 
of white farm tenancy in North Carolina and the South. 


Economic Classes and Levels 


1. The Farm Owners. The land of these two Chatham county town- 
ships is owned by 176 landlords—135 white and 41 black. ‘Their ac- 
cumulated wealth in 1921—in farm lands, buildings, livestock, implements 
and machinery, household goods and utensils and other personal properties 
—was $624,642 for the whites and $93,856 for the blacks. Which is an 


How Farm TENANTS Live 13 


average of $4,627 per white farm owner, and $2,407 per black farm owner. 
Thirteen of them run small roadside stores. All but sixty-one are active 
farmers, living on and cultivating a portion of their lands and letting out 
the rest to renters and croppers. Twenty are absentee-landlords living in 
other counties—mainly in Chapel Hill. Much or most of the land of the 
farm owners is lying idle, because farm labor has drifted into the cotton 
mills at Carrboro, Bynum and elsewhere, or is getting better wages at 
public work on roads, bridges and buildings, or in hauling, jitney driving, 
and odd jobs of various sorts in nearby towns. Farming in these two 
townships is at a low ebb, for lack of renters, croppers and wage hands. 

2. The Tenants. The tenants number 153—white 51 and black 102. 
The ratio of tenants to all farmers is therefore 46.5 percent or nearly half, 
against 35.8 percent in the county-at-large, and 43.5 percent in the state- 
at-large. The 51 white tenants have, accumulated personal property 
amounting to $23,277 which is an average of only $456 per family. The 
102 black tenants hold property amounting to $31,430, an average of $308 
per family. The families of the black and white tenants, as you see, are 
not very far apart in worldly goods. 

The tenants of both races fall into two classes, namely renters and 
croppers. The white renters are 38 and the white croppers are 13. The 
black renters are 66 and the black croppers are 36. 

All the tenants are farming under one-year contracts, and all the con- 
tracts are informal and unwritten. Tenant leases in writing are nowhere 
common in the South. 

(1) The Renters. A renter is a tenant who owns his own workstock and 
farm implements—enough to ‘run himself,’ as the phrase goes. As a rule 
he pays three-fourths of the fertilizer bill and gets two-thirds of the corn 
and three-fourths of the cash crop money. All of everything else the renter 
produces, except the cotton seed, is his. The details and ratios vary a 
little here and there according to what the renter furnishes and also ac- 
cording to the fertility of the farm. The renters are the upper-crust of the 
tenants, the top of the pot, as they say in our farm regions. They rank 
next to the landlords in the ownership of property—mainly personal prop- 
erty. They own something more than their household goods. In a small 
way they own the tools of their trade, and enjoy a fairly large measure of 
independent self-direction. I may add that tenant and renter are inter- 
changeable terms in Chatham and generally throughout the South. 

(2) The Croppers. A cropper is a tenant who is staked by the Jand- 
lord—is ‘run by the landlord,’ in the common phrase of our country 
regions. He owns little or nothing but the simple things in and around 
his cabin. Usually he owns no workstock and no farm implements, or not 
enough to count in the year’s bargain with the landlord. Everything is 
furnished by the landlord—land, dwelling, firewood, workstock, implements, 
and from time to time small advances of money and pantry supplies to 
help him produce the crops. He pays half the fertilizer bill and gets half 
the corn and the cash crop money. Everything else except the cotton seed 
is his. Against the cropper’s half of the crop money, the landlord charges 


14 How Farm TENANTS Live 


the cropper’s debts for advances and the cropper’s share of the fertilizer 
bills. Croppers are ‘havers’ (halfers) as the phrase goes, with little or. 
nothing to invest in farming except the bare labor of themselves and their 
families. They are so called because they get not two-thirds or three- 
fourths of the corn and the cash crop money, as in case of the renters, 
but only half. As in case of the renter, the cropper’s rent details vary 
somewhat on different farms. 

Croppers are distinctly the under-crust of the farmers in the South— 
the bottom-rail, the under-dog, in country phrase. They are a type of 
farm population that is almost unknown in the North and West, but they 
have been a most significant fact in Southern agriculture for more than 
a half century. Nevertheless the term did not get into the census dic- 
tionary until 1920—a strange oversight, considering the fact that 225,000 
or a full fourth of all the white tenants in the thirteen cotton and tobacco 
states of the South are croppers. In North Carolina the ratio is one- 
fourth, and in Chatham it is one-fourth, and in Baldwin and Williams 
townships it is one-fourth. One-fourth looks like a fatal ratio for the 
submerged white croppers of the South. The croppers in particular are 
The Forgotten Men that Walter H. Page wrote about—The Men Whom 
God Forgot, in. the phrase of Robert W. Service. 


Accumulated Property and Gross Money Incomes 


How little renters and croppers own and how little money they handle 
during the year appears in the following table, covering the year 1921 in 
Baldwin and Williams townships of Chatham county. 


\ Owned Total Cash 
Property Per Cash Per 

ECONOMIC CLASSES Owned Family Income Family 
ISS) WHITE OWNETS 600g a oinis oi dcr apnaines $624,642 $4,627 $ 84,553 $626 
21 DIQCHINOWIRETE ss 41s):4 lds s1d Fale ia lelole ie 93,856 2,407 21,708 597 
DOW WUITAEPONGEES Ay Cue Niall 19.99 526 9,525. 251 
1 Ss WRILE COD DELS iets. 4s elaiess eee 3,279 426 1,993 153 
66 Digeku renters ee. wots eau ee 27,016 409 19,053 289 
SO DICK CYODPerSs ye NU e Ai Nea 4,113 123 one ATG 197 
VEOH LALIN CLAY LAIN VOLT SW e wine Muinbakanyetyan, $772,905 $2,349 $139,609 $424 


In order to render more vivid the money-bare condition of the farmers 
in Williams and Baldwin townships in Chatham, we are tabulating the 
money handled in their homes per person per day in 1921. Throughout 
this study we are speaking of the gross money income of these farmers. 
And bear in mind (1) that 69 percent of this income was derived from 
farming, most of which came in lump sums in the fall when their cotton 
and tobacco were sold, and (2) that 31 percent of it was produced by 
other interests and activities more or less casual. This casual income was 
the ready money they handled from day to day. The bulk of their cash 
was not in hand till the market season at the end of the year. 


How Farm TENANTS Live 15 


The average daily cash income of these 329 farmers in 1921 was as 
follows: 


Family Cash Daily Cash 


-ECONOMIC CLASSES Per Year Per Person 
ROOM WHUCOLOWHETA seis iccitisaarmin eine el lore a lei'ete go ks $626 34 cents 
MUP LEACKWO WEES 100) Tiley chasse ee PTE WIGS Sw WM atone elke OOT Be in 
MO RUUNVSEDLE US PCMICOLS Uo y cies ie RING ety 4 o!la! mle lew: oe biby w lei 201. Ea? 
PeMEPEIE OH CTOUIDOLS  aiede cl octet ats fol IB iG 0 oud) alle! 6-5 ola igual Bio (ate 153 Seneay 
MLC MI TORLOLS (is (oc cig ayer sie al 8 ad 44m lbialed eg odlle 289 LOS 8 
RE ORMEL ODORS 12) 5 Fhe ge agen wale oie ln) wlo'a('s a ele ai pe 197 LOR a 


If these were not actual figures reported in person by the farmers them- 
selves, they would be absolutely unbelievable. How can farm tenants live 
and keep their families alive on average actual cash incomes ranging from 
eight to sixteen cents a day per family member? How can they afford to 
wait ten or twelve months for the balance of their money? The answer is, 
They couldn’t but for (1) the meagre credit of the supply stores, and (2). 
advances of their landlords—small sums of money and pantry supplies from 
time to time. And when their crop money comes in later, their debts 
consume it almost to the last cent. 

‘Such is the economic status of 153 renters and croppers, black and 
white, or nearly half of all the farmers in this little area of the cotton- 
tobacco belt in the South—the status of 51 or more than a fourth of all 
the white farmers, the status of 102 or nearly three-fourths of all the 
negro farmers, in Williams and Baldwin townships in Chatham county, 
North Carolina. 

As the farm tenants are in this little corner of Chatham, so they are 
in general throughout the state and every other state in the South. 

The: economic levels of the 329 farm homes covered by this particular 
field-study are indicated by the following charts exhibiting (1) the average 
of property owned per family, and (2) the average money handled per day 
per person in the household. 

The concentration of farm property in the hands of the landowners, 
and the amazingly low levels of farm tenants in property ownership appear 
at a glance. In detail the facts are as follows: (1) a little more than 
half of all the farmers, both races counted into the total, are landowners, 
but they own more than nine-tenths of al Ithe property. (2) The black 
farm owners are a little more than a fourth of all the negro farmers, but 
they own three-fourths of all the negro property. (3) The white farm 
owners are nearly three-fourths of all the white farmers, but they own 
ninety-seven percent of all the white property. 

Farm areas in general are distinctly characterized by the equable dis- 
tribution of property, but not so in Southern farm tenancy areas. The dis- 
parity in property ownership between farm owners and farm tenants is 
startling. Such farm wealth as we have in the South is in the hands of . 
the farm owners. It is so in the case of both races. What the tenants 
own—renters or croppers—is nearly nothing. The drawl of a white 
eropper exhibits it with photographic accuracy; ‘‘Ain’t no trouble fer me 


16 How Farm Tenants Live 


Properly Levels Per Family 
329 Farms. 
Baldwm+Williams. 
Townships 


Chatham County,N.C. 
fe io Nl 


a (exes 


3b Black bb Black IBWhite 38 White YIBlack 135 White 
Croppers. Renlers. Cro ppers Renters. Owners. Owners 


EAMG EH 


to move. I ain’t got nothing much but er Soap gourd and er string er 
red-peppers. All I got to do is ter call up Tige, spit in the fire place, and 
start down ther road.?’ 

But the essential disparity lies in the ownership of land or the lack of 
such ownership. The tenants as a class own no land. They own a little 


How Farm Tenants Live 17 


personal property, but no land. The ownership of land is just as sig- 
nificant today as it was ten centuries ago when the Saxons coined the 
phrases: ‘‘The land is the man; no Jand, no man; who owns the land owns 
the man; who owns the land rules the realm.’’ 

Landownership and liberty go hand in hand in every land under Heaven 
under any form of government. Freedom—economic, social and political 
—lies essentially in the ownership of farms in the countryside, and homes 
in the towns and cities. Landless farm tenants and homeless city 
dwellers are a rapidly increasing body of people everywhere in America. 
Already they are a majority in twenty-one states of the Union—in the 
Great Industrial area north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, they 
are now an overwhelming majority. And some day these people must be 
reckoned with en masse. Macaulay’s prophecy set 1937 as the fateful 
year of reckoning between the Haves and the Havenots in America. The 
beginnings of this time, said Lord Bryce in 1910, lie not more than twenty 
years ahead. America in her swift onward progress—he goes on to say— 
sees, looming on the horizon and now no longer distant,-a line of mists 
and shadows wherein dangers may lie concealed, whose form and magni- 
tude she can scarcely yet conjecture—The American Commonwealth, 
volume II, pp 912-13, 1910 edition. The common condition of landlessness 
will at last breed a common like-mindedness. Signs of it appear with in- 
creasing frequency of late—as for instance in Texas in the last state 
election—and they are disquieting. Can a civilization forever endure on 
the basis of political freedom and economic serfdom? At bottom this is 
the issue that is being fought out in England at this very minute—with 
ballots, in the English way. Soon or late this is the fundamental issue 
that America faces, and let us hope that it can be faced in the English 
and not in the Russian way. 


Cash Income Levels 


The landowning farmers and the landless tenants, in the Chatham area 
surveyed, are far apart in the possession of property. There is less distance 
between them in the annual average cash handled per household. David 
R. Coker of Hartsville, S. C., reckoned the average cash incomes on the 
cotton farms of the South in 1921 at $600.* 

In our survey, the average cash income of 135 white farm owners was 
$626 or a little above Mr. Coker’s estimate; it was $597 or a trifle below 
for the 41 black farm owners. As for the tenants, it ranged from $153 for 
the white croppers to $289 for the black renters. The average gross 
cash income for the 329 farmers, owners and tenants, black and white, 
was only $424 in 1921 or nearly a full third less than Mr. Coker’s estimate. 

These annual cash incomes are in striking contrast with $881.90 the 
average necessary money income for a family of three, and with $1,501.45 
the average for a family of six in the anthracite coal region of Penn- 
sylvania, as reported by the National Industrial Conference Board, in 
February 1922. 


* Address before the Cosmos Club, Columbia, S. C., October 22, 1922. 


18 How Farm Tenants Live 


The black farm owners and the white farm owners were nearly on a 
level in annual cash incomes per family; and the negro renters were well 
above the white renters. The black croppers occupy the next level and the 
white croppers foot the column. The croppers, white and black, handle less 
than $200 in cash in the run of the year. i 

The cash incomes of the white farm owners are reduced to a small 
measure by the idle unproductive land they own. Their main wealth is in 
land. They are land-poor today, as our landowners were in the days im- 
mediately following the war of 1860-65. Nevertheless they hold these 
profitless lands with grim determination. No other business men on earth 
would hold on to dead capital in such large measure. 

The inadequacy of these cash incomes is better realized when they are 
reduced to the daily cash per household member. 

The table is as follows: 


Daily Cash 
CASH INCOME CLASSES Per Person 
Be) Web tbe hr 0 er rg A CL A VU Carel ai Ravana Ta at ce 34 cents 
2) ye Bleek wha rra Oweere sion nny aun 0) ti oh ee NU ere na Oe a a aa Bay itn 
BH DLACK HTONCETE Oil Pee ena aI IGMACR Nar aey LUAU a7) THA, CORO ANE. uta aR LG penee 
BAN W DIEGO PONS Wig tein ieee a hovey albanian at alte da eon atte Ca aan Gita Sailer eae cen van ES Ut Be Lacie? 
Do Black MCLG pperss aac eulalssaie eines bh aaiarae inti leie tele ANSE PIN e se WS FENDA 91 LO Mee 
Gli White Croppers tik science as. felled at Gh as atin td So's sm eet ale oa ie FR ee Saths 


The advantage of the landless negro farmer over the landless white 
farmer is plainer than print. 

But aside from the.question of class levels, the bare facts of daily 
.™money income per household member are arresting—or they ought to be. 

Everybody knows about the picayune daily wage of pauper labor in the 
far East. We have the same thing in the cotton-belt of the South. We have 
had vague notions about this thing, but here are the facts or a small cross 
section of the facts. Half of all our Southern farmers, counting blacks 
and whites together, are tenants, and a full third of these tenants are 
croppers. for long years they have been producing cotton on a pauper 
level at a pauper daily wage in money. 

Will they continue to do it? For a half century they have stuck to 
this back-breaking, heart-breaking task because of use and wont and cus- 
tom. Will they keep it up forever? It does not seem likely. These sub- 
merged farmers cannot produce cotton under boll weevil conditions and 
keep soul and body together—or not at any prices that cotton has baie eth 
at any time during the last forty years. 

And if they quit? Well, if they do, the merchants and bankers of the 
South will face bankruptcy and the cotton spinners of the country will be 
in sore straits. 

And about these facts of gross cash incomes in money, per person in 
farmer households, this may be said—they are facts. 

We do not know and probably never will know the exact cost of pro- 
ducing a pound of cotton on any farm or in any community of any state. 
The cost varies according to the season, the size of the farm, the industry, 


19 


How Farm Tenants Live 


: SLOUM() 


ayyMSe 


‘SLOUMC() "‘SAaJUIY ‘sunjuoy  suaddorg ‘sraddory 


Med ih 4°F I 99 OPUM BE MX’ jel WE SLUM Cl 


1GBI 
ON’ weyeys 
‘sciusumo] 
SULEN | AA* LIMP IE 
‘SWIPE ETS 
‘Ayuaey 4194 SPULOUT YSED S501) abeuany 


20 How Farm TenaAants LIvE 


the technical skill and the managerial ability of the farmer; and reliable 
facts are difficult to assemble because book-keeping and cost accounting 
are rare in farm areas. The best we have been able to learn about the 
cost of producing cotton is barely better than a mathematical guess more 
or less approximate. ‘ 

And we know almost as little about the net labor income of the cotton 
farmer. It is a problem of the same character and complexity as that of 
reckoning the unit cost of cotton production, and the usual results of farm 
income surveys in the cotton belt are little more than arithmetical 
approximations. 

But we can know about the gross money incomes of farmers. That in- 
formation is as simple as abe’s. We know about the gross money incomes 
of 329 farmers in two Chatham county townships in 1921—about (1) the 
cash incomes sourced in farm activities and interests, and (2) the casual 
money received from all other sources. 

And no matter what their net incomes were, their gross incomes in 
money were a beggar’s pittance, ranging from eight cents a day per person 
in the household of white croppers to 34 cents per person in the household 
of white farm owners. 

Why ask about the net money incomes of people with pitiful money 
rewards of this sort? We know without asking that surplus cash for 
comforts and luxuries, for teachers and preachers, for books and papers, 
for church causes and tax treasuries is scarce—how scarce these farmers 
alone know; and this scarcity imperils every forward movement in the 
community and in the commonwealth alike. 

Here is the explanation of the farmer’s interest in taxes and tax propo- 
sitions. His interest is simple and single—he is opposed as a class to any- 
thing that increases his taxes. And his opposition is not sourced in 
stupidity nor in miserly reluctance: it is sourced in a collapsed pocket book. 


II 
The Social Estate of White Farm Tenants 


Having considered (1) the property possessions and (2) the gross 
money incomes of 329 farmers, owners and tenants, black and white, in 
the area surveyed, let us now turn our attention to the 51 white tenants 
alone, and ask who they are, how they live, their chances at farm owner- 
ship under present conditions by self-effort alone, the need for outside aid, 
the number who could be aided in this territory, the probable number of 
such tenants in the state-at-large, and the feasible forms of aid that the 
state might effectively offer. 

1. Who They Are. These fifty-one white tenants fall into three classes, 
(1) twenty-five renters living on and cultivating family lands, (2) thirteen 
renters with no landowning ancestry—with one exception the sons of 
landless tenant farmers, and (3). thirteen croppers who are without neigh- 
borhood kinship in land tenures—pilgrims, strangers and sojourners in the 
land, with little or no workstock and farm implements of their own, and 


How Farm TENANTS LIVE 21 


a mintmum worldly wealth in household goods and utensils or with an 
average of only $426 per family, which is only $17 more than that of the 66 
negro renters alongside whom they struggle for existence. 

(1) The twenty-five white renters living on family lands are distinctly 
a preferred class of tenant farmers—here as everywhere else in the South. 
They are the sons, sons-in-law, or nephews of their landlords. They rent 
on favorable terms, they share in small or large measure in the properties 


and produets of tribal farming—in fruits, vegetables, poultry, butter and 


eggs, in milk animals, workstock and implements, in automobiles and 
buggies in trips to town on week days and to church on Sundays, and so on 
and on. What they need they borrow from the homefolks. They belong. to 
the landed gentry. They enjoy the social estate of the land owners. They 
live and move on a level with the best in the neighborhood. They are 
apprenticeship farmers who look forward with more or less certainty to 
land-ownership by gift, inheritance, marriage, or purchase on easy terms. 
They know, none better, that farming is no maypole dance; but there are 
better days in store—not affluence and ease to be sure, but the prideful 
ownership of farms of their own and life on the highest levels in their 
home community and county. They are born and bred to farming and the 
way ahead is open. Many of them choose to be farmers as a way of life 
despite the call of the crowds in mill towns and city centers. Many or 
most of the five thousand additional white farm owners in North Carolina 
in the last census period rose into land-ownership out of this class. 

Of the 135 white farm owners in the area covered by this survey fifty- 
four or two-fifths received their farms by gift, inheritance or marriage 
during the last- twenty years, and of the 51 white tenants at present 
twenty-five or nearly exactly one-half are tenants on family lands, and 
are heading into ownership by birth or wedlock. Kith and kin relation- 
ships are now and have always been the South’s main reliance for increases 
in the number of landowning farmers and for a stable agriculture based 
on ownership. 

But mark this—these young people, bred to the purple of farm owner- 
ship, are the very farmers who can most easily move out of farm territories 
and adopt the manners and habits of city life; and under boll weevil con- 
ditions this is what they are doing in appalling numbers. So because the 
ownership of land in these devastated areas means farm profits and rent 
revenues reduced to zero, and farming as a business rendered unattractive 
or impossible. More and more they are turning away from farming as a 
livelihood in the South, and as a consequence farm tenancy in the cotton- 
tobacco belt moves steadily toward the peasant type of European countries. 
The South, in short, is developing a kind of farm tenancy that is unknown 
elsewhere in the United States. In the North and West farm tenancy is 
a capitalistic enterprise; in the south As_a social estate." 


~* It would be impossible in any cotton-belt county to find a “fifth of the tenants 
operating with capital ranging from $3,000 to $9,000 each, as in Chester county, 
Penn., or one hundred tenants each operating with capital ranging from $20,000 to 
$60,000 and over, as in Jowa. See figures in Bizzell’s Tenantry in the United 
States, pp. 137, 143.' Tenancy in the South is not a matter of deliberate choice on 
part of farmers with operating capital; it is a matter of hard necessity on part of 
moneyless men. | 


22, How Farm TENANTS LIVE 


(2) The thirteen white renters who are not living on family lands are 
all—or all but one—the sons of renters or croppers. They were not born 
to landownership. If ever they own farms of their own, they must depend 
on self-effort alone—on industry, thrift, sagacity, sobriety and integrity. 
Their lot in life is toil. With only two exceptions, their wives are hoe- 
hands in the fields, from eight to ten hours a day during periods ranging 
from thirty to two hundred days of the year according to family cireum- 
stances. One of these women is a mother fifty-one years old. The un- 
broken rule is to send the children, both boys and girls alike, into field 
work at seven or eight years of age—so because there is no hired labor Ho 
be had and no money with which to pay such labor. 

The family property these self-help white renters have been able to 
accumulate ranges from $243 to $1405 in value; the average is $424 or 
only $153 less than the worldly possessions of the renters seated on family 
lands. Their ownership of workstock and farm tools is an evidence of in- 
dustry and thrift. In varying degrees it indicates a look upward out of 
tenancy into ownership. A further indication of industry is afforded by | 
the fact that their average annual cash income per family is nearly $100 
more than that of the white croppers—$251 against $153. They own no 
more personal property than the white croppers, but they work harder and 
look higher. As for social status, they are fairly on a level with the pre- 
ferred class of white renters on family lands. White owners and tenants 
of both classes worship together in the churches, their children play to- 
gether at school and vie with one another for applause at the school com- 
mencements, their families exchange visits freely, they fish and hunt to- 
gether in the open seasons. There are no apparent class differences between 
white renters and white farm owners in this territory. Both types of 
renters—those living on family lands and those without kinship to their. 
landlords—are fairly stable types, living as they do on the same farms or 
in the same neighborhoods year after year. The stability of the white 
- renters is best indicated by the ownership of milk cows. Twenty-nine of 
the thirty-eight own forty-one cows; eight of these own two cows each and 
two own three cows each. Only nine renters own no cows and three of 
these renters have the use of cows belonging to their landlords. Tenants 
of migratory instincts and habits rarely ever own cows—they are a bother 
in moving. In this tenancy area milk and butter are abundant staples of 
family diet; which puts Chatham in sharp contrast with the all-cotton 
counties of the Tidewater and the Coastal Plains. These renters are 
people of stable citizenship, or so in the main. Good tenants are too hard 
to get and to keep, for the landlords to be over-exacting in rent contracts 
and business dealings. Many of these self-help tenants have been on the 
same farms year after year. The ratio of change from year to year is 
less than one-fifth, against one-half in the cotton belt of the State and the 
South. . 

(3) The thirteen white croppers are in a different category in many 
or most particulars. And mind you, they are a fourth of the white tenants 
in this territory. They lack industry in the area surveyed; as shown 


How Farm Tenants Live 23 


by the fact that their average annual cash income per family is $44 less 
than that of the black croppers, nearly $100 less than that of white 
renters, and $136 less than that of the black renters. They lack aspira- 
tion, as shown by the fact that they own little or no workstock and farm 
tools, without which they could not hope to rise out of tenancy into owner- 
ship. They lack the home-owning aspirations and virtues of the thirteen 
self-help farmers in the class next above them. Their standards of living 
are higher but their levels of life are lower than those of the black farmers 
alongside whom they live and work; inevitably so because their average 
cash income is less—22 percent less than that of the black croppérs, 
47 percent less than that of the black renters, and 74 percent less than 
that of the black owners. They suffer in personal and in family pride. 
They move from pillar to post from year to year. They are a migratory 
type of farmers. They are cursed with the restless foot of the Wandering 
Jew. They lack identity with the community in which they live. They 
lack abiding citizenship and a sense of proprietary interest in schools 
and churches and neighborhood enterprises. They lack a sense of respon- 
sibility for community morals, law and order. They live on an average 
cash income of eight cents a day per family member in the area surveyed 
and upon some such pauper wage the South over. They are unduly tempted 
into the business of making and vending illicit liquors. They furnish 
a disproportionate percent of the white cases on the criminal court dockets. 
They are satisfied with their landless lot in life. They are a contented not 
a bold peasantry, in Goldsmith’s phrase, but they are not their country’s 
pride. As a class they are a doubtful economic asset and a distinct social 
menace. Or so they are as a rule in Chatham, in every other county of 
the state—in this state and in every other state of the cotton and tobacco 
belt. 


2. The Homes They. Live In. From this point on we group both 
types of white renters together, because they live on almost exactly the 
same.social level. The differences are trivial and not worth noting. From 
time to time we deal with the white croppers separately because they are 
a class occupying a distinctly lower level of existence. 


The households of the thirty-eight white renters number 178 souls. 
The children number 101 and sixty of these are children of school ages. 
The dwellings they live in are usually of board and timber construction, a 
few are old log houses, the left-over remains of former days. Six of them 
let in the weather through the roofs or the floors and walls. Twenty have 
203 window lights out and ten have shutters off. In more than half of 
these dwellings it is possible to study astronomy through the holes in the 
roof and geology through the cracks in the floor. There is a separate 
dwelling for each family, and the 38 dwellings are scattered throughout 
104 square miles of territory or close to three square miles for every family. 
There is no lack of elbow-room for family life in this farm area. 


On an average these dwellings are thirty years old; nearly half of them 
have faced the elements for a quarter century or more. Only four have 


24 How Farm Tenants Live 


been built within the last four years. How can farm owners with a gross 
money income averaging $629 a year build new tenant houses or keep the 
old houses in proper repair? 

Nor is there any lack of elbow space within the tenant dwellings. 
There are 164 rooms and 147 beds for the 178 occupants. The bed rooms 
number 124 or more than three per household on an average. Of one-room 
shacks there are none, and of two-room shanties only four. Eleven dwell- 
ings have four rooms each, and fifteen contain from five to six rooms each. 
These last were the homes of farm owners in by-gone days, now abandoned 
to tenants. The crowding of humans as in city tenements is a thing un- 
known in the country regions of the South. Parlors are rare—there are - 
only two in all the thirty-eight dwellings. There are no separate sitting 
rooms. Bed rooms and sitting rooms are one and the same, and kitchens 
are invariably used as dining rooms. Only seven of the dwellings are ceiled 
or plastered, only ten are painted or whitewashed, and only thirteen 
evidence care on part of the occupants. 

But there are signs of family pride and aspirations here and there. 
One tenant has a washing machine, two have automobiles, two have re- 
frigerators, three have telephones, four have organs, four have victrolas 
and three have other musical instruments, five have rugs on the floors, nine 
live in dwellings wholly screened and seven in dwellings partly screened, 
nine have grass plots about their houses, thirty-one have flower beds, and 
thirty-five have sewing machines. But in the main, comforts, luxuries and 
conveniences are sadly lacking in these households—how could they be 
provided on cash incomes averaging fourteen cents a day per family 
member ? 

3. Health Conditions. None of the thirty-eight families have running 
water in their dwellings, thirty-five have wells, all of them over twenty 
feet deep; ten of these are open and twenty-four are closed; twenty are 
under the kitchen or the porches or in the yard within thirty feet of the 
house. Three of the families must bring the daily water supply in oft 
repeated trips up-hill from springs. 

Only eight families have out-door closets, and these are all used by 
both sexes. None of the out-houses are fly-proof or water-tight, all are 
open to the poultry and pigs, none are ever cleaned, and three of them are 
drained toward the water supply. The bushes and the barn lot buildings 
are the screens of family privacy for thirty homes. Soil pollution by body- 
waste is the rule here as elsewhere throughout the country regions of the 
United States.* Kitchen waste in all the dwellings is fed to the hogs in 
the nearby pens, and on six lots the pens are drained toward the water 
supply. ‘ 

A doctor’s office is on an average of eight miles away from the homes 
of these thirty-eight farm tenants. And so only seventeen families called 
in physicians during the year. Five others called on the doctor in his 
office. The total paid by twenty-two families to the doctors in fees and to 


* Rural Sanitation——-Public Health Builetin No. 94, U. S. Public Health Service, 
Washington, D. C. 


How Farm Tenants Live 25 


the druggists for prescriptions was $1068 which was an average of $48.64 
per family. Thirty-five of the homes spent $219 for patent medicines and 
nostrums of one sort or another, which is an average of $6 per family. 
Nearly one-ninth of the total cash incomes of this group of tenants went 
for illnesses, to say nothing of funeral expenses when the illness ended in 
death. Seven homes had doctors’ bills ranging from $50 to $400 each. In 
one home the worldly possessions amounted to $218 and the doctors’ bill 
to $75; in another the doctors’ bill was $160 or a full third of all the 
tenant owned on earth; in another the doctors’ bill amounted to $400 and 
the tenant’s worldly goods to only $289. No wonder the doctor is called 
in as seldom as possible and always at the last moment—not because his 
charges are so large, but because the tenant’s ability to pay is so little. 
And no wonder that all but three of the households rely for the most part 
on quack remedies and patent medicines. Small cash incomes in farm- 
owner homes and poverty in tenant homes is the reason why doctors cannot 
live in the country regions, and why they are fleeing out of the rural 
counties. If a single doctor had all the tenant practice of these two 
townships he would have had only $1068 to live on in 1921, supposing he 
were able to collect every cent of it. Ill health and the cost of it in cash 
keeps many or most of these tenants poor—hopelessly poor. Solomon was 
right: verily the destruction of the poor is their poverty. Death is more 
endurable than sickness in many tenant homes. Said one sad-faced mother 
who had lost two children in infancy. ‘‘I reckon it was a-God’s mercy. I 
didn’t have nothing fit ter feed ’em on and no chance ter take care uv 
%7am.’? 

The children borne by the mothers in these households in the course of 
a life-time number 148. Forty-seven of these children are dead. Eighteen 
were born dead, eleven died during the first year, and six during the first 
five years. Twenty-seven of the mothers were delivered by doctors, five by 
white midwives, one by a negro midwife, and five were unattended in child- 
birth save by the panic-stricken members of the households. Only one- 
eighth of all the children were delivered by midwives—a most surprising 
discovery. Most people have an idea that midwives play a larger part in 
the country regions. Only four of the thirty-eight tenant mothers have 
ever received the literature of the State Department of Public Health, and 
these four are the daughters-in-law of home-owning farmers. Six house- 
holds have had no medical examination of their children at school and no 
reports of their physical defects. Not one of all the 178 members of these 
tenant households has ever been vaccinated against smallpox or typhoid 
fever. Disease prevention and health promotion are little considered in 
farm tenant homes. 

Two things stand out in this field study. First, the virility of the 
men, the fecundity of the women, and the amazing grip on life of our 
tenant populations. The signs of physical degeneracy are rare in the 
area surveyed. Our renters are a coming not a disappearing element of 
population in the South. All they need is a decent chance; and when we 
say this, we have in mind the renters, not the croppers, who represent the 


26 How Farm Tenants Live 


bottom-most levels of life in our farm regions. And second, the prevalence 
of sickness of one sort or another—the result not of insufficient food, 
quantities considered, but of unvaried, ill-balanced diets, and untutored 
ways of cooking and serving meals. Disordered digestion and defective 
teeth are the common causes of chronic morbidity; soil pollution and fly- 
borne diseases are the major causes of mortality. Or so we came to 
conclude. 

4. Schools and School Influences. For the white children of these two 
townships there are seven public schools. Six are one-teacher schools of 
elementary grade, open for only six months of the year, usually in the fall 
and winter months when the demand for work in the fields is least. One 
is a five-teacher school at Bynum, a little cotton mill village of some forty- 
odd dwellings. Here the children have a chance at two years of high- 
school subjects—their only chance at such schooling in these two townships. 
For more they must go into other townships or counties. All the ele- 
mentary schools in the open country are housed in buildings that are old 
and weather-stained. None of them have been built within the last twenty 
years. They are taught for the most part by young girls in their teens or 
by young women born in Chatham or in the neighboring counties. All the 
feachers have had schooling in high school subjects, four have had some 
schooling in college subjects, but none are college graduates. The rule is 
a new teacher in each school every year, because the teacher is dissatisfied 
with the school conditions of the district or because the people of the dis- 
trict are dissatisfied with the teacher. Exceptions to this rule are few 
from year to year. The schools and country roads are so inadequate that 
the people are strongly minded to petition the legislature to annex their 
territory to Durham county where school and road funds are more 
abundant. As a result the Chatham school board offers to replace the six 
small country schools next year with three consolidated schools, two in 
Williams and one in Baldwin. The country people are strongly in favor 
of larger, better schools, but they are finding it difficult to agree upon the 
locations of the consolidated schools proposed. 


The inadequate school advantages of this area have left their marks 
upon the fifty-one tenant households. One hundred and seventy-three of 
the occupants are more than ten years of age, and sixteen of them are 
unable to read or write, which is an illiteracy ratio of 9.2 percent, against 
a state average of 8.2 percent. 


One or more illiterates were found in six families. Thirteen of the six- 
teen were found in three families. These are the families in which illiter- 
acy reigns. In two families are seventeen people ten years of age and 
over, and ten of them are illiterate. The extreme case is one cropper family 
with six in the household; five are ten years old or over and three are illiter- 
ate. Nobody in this household belongs to the church, and nobody goes to 
Sunday school. It is the excessive number of illiterates in these three 
families that smudges the score of the two townships. But for these and 
one illiterate each in three other families it could be said that there is no 


How Farm Tenants Live 27 


white illiteracy in Baldwin and Williams townships. There is none whatso- 
ever in forty-five of the fifty-one tenant familes. 

The school levels of the thirty-eight renter families are significant of the 
culture of this tenancy area. There are 103 people in these households 
seven years old and over. Thirty-seven have reached only one or another of 
the first four grades; ten got only as far as the fifth grade; nine got only 
into the sixth grade; and twenty-eight reached the seventh grade. Only 
nineteen or around a fifth of them all have ever had any acquaintance 
with high school subjects. For nearly exactly half of the renter house- 
holds, school culture may be said to stop on a fifth reader level. Hight 
people in these households have had only one year of high school instruc- 
tion, four reached the second high school grade, five dropped out in the 
third year, and only two were graduated. There is no member of any 
tenant household in all this area who ever went to college or ever received 
a college diploma. 

The record of the thirteen white cropper households is even more sig- 
nificant. There are forty people in these families seven years old and 
over, but only five have ever gone beyond the first four grades of school. 
One got as far as the sixth grade, one as far as the seventh grade, and three 
got into the first year of high school subjects. For nine-tenths of the 
cropper families life stops on a fourth reader level. The contrast between 
the school culture of renters and croppers appears at a glance in the charts 
that follow. 


28 How Farm Tenants Live 


School kevels Reached. 
In 13 Cropper Hovseholda 
By UZ Rople -5\rs. Old ane Gyer 
William « Baldwin Townships. 

Chathen Calne 


i921. 


(Grades Grades _L High School Qrades.] 


How Farm Tenants Live 29 


Saket Weve («, Reached 
In 38 Veenieus H ovse holds 
By 103 Oce upants-5 Yrs.Ofd and Over. 
William + Baldwm Town ships 
C hatham County , NC. 


a ae 19a. 


| Rople.| 


[ 


Wth Sth bth ‘Ith “ist Ye and Ye _ord¥e th 
ones aa TN 


The country regions furnish three-fourths of the college professors and 
five-sixths of all the preachers of America, says Ashenhurst; but in North 
Carolina they are born and bred in the homes of farm owners, not in the 
homes of farm tenants. There may be exceptions, but they could not be 
brought to\light by the research questionnaires of Rev. J. M. Arnette, a 
Baptist minister applying for a doctorate degree from the University of 
North Carolina. His conclusion is that the farm tenant homes of this 
state give no preachers to the churches of his faith, or so few as to be 
negligible in the total count of Baptist clergymen. We definitely know 


30 How Farm TENANTS LIvE 


that farm tenancy raises the ratios of white illiteracy and lowers the ratios 
of white church membership with fatal certainty in the South. Does it 
also blow out the light in the souls of our white tenants? If so, farm 
tenancy ought to probe to the quick of the intelligence and Christian 
conscience of church authorities and church members, for the sixty-three 
thousand white tenant households of North Carolina contain nearly 
one-fifth of the entire white population of the state. 

5. What Farm Tenants Read. The thirty-eight tenant households sub- 
scribe for newspapers and magazines, receive free public bulletins, and 
own books as follows: 


12 families subscribe for a country weekly each. 

12 families subscribe for a farm paper each. 

9 families subscribe for popular magazines, 14 in number. 

6 families subscribe for church papers, seven in number. 

5 families subscribe for a daily paper each. 

38 families have each a Bible and an almanac. 

0 families subscribe for children’s papers or magazines. 

4 families receive the State Public Health Bulletin. — : 

0 families receive any other bulletins—from any state department, or 
any state college. 

13 families have all told 153 children’s books including school books. 

14 families have 38 religious books, mainly songbooks. 

3 families have 43 novels. 

34 families have 473 volumes of various other sorts, mail order 
catalogues, reports, old medical books, law books, etc., most of these 
in three families. ’ 

0 families have any books on agriculture or country life. 
0 families borrow books from school or other public libraries. 
2 families have no books but the Bible. 


The bulk of the papers, magazines, books and bulletins are in the 
homes of thirteen tenants on family lands who have inherited the tradi- 
tions of family culture in farm-owner homes. Seven self-help tenants and 
five croppers subscribe to newspapers and have a few books in their homes 
—one of these, a goodly number of books. Twenty-six or more than half 
of the fifty-one tenant homes are bare of books, papers, and magazines. 
The wonder is not that so few but that so many books, papers, and maga- 
zines reach these farm tenant homes. The 153 books for the children are 
the bright particular spot in these homes. One hundred and fifty-three 
children’s books would not long keep alive the sixty youngsters of reading 
ages in thirty-eight homes, but we dare to say that they play a large part 
in making country life endurable. 

The country weekly leads the list of newspapers, here as everywhere 
else in the state, and advertisers may like to note this fact—that is, if 
they want to reach the people who have a minimum of pin money to 
spend. | 

Church papers come fourth in the order of frequency, and the editors 
of church papers may like to note that fact. Farm tenants crave country 


How Farm TENANTS LIVE 1 


weeklies, farm papers, and popular magazines more than they crave the 
religious journals of North Carolina. . 

Aside from the Bible, the books in these homes are miscellaneous 
volumes, children’s books, novels, and religious books, named in a descend- 
ing order of numbers. No book on agriculture was found in any tenant 
home, and in one cropper home no Bible. 

The state departments and the state institutions may like to note that 
aside from four homes receiving the State Health Bulletins, they are reach- 
ing none of these tenant homes with official literature. If they have an 
idea that their extension activities are covering North Carolina like the 
dew, they are mistaken. There is an immense work for them all to do in 
field services to the people of the state. The homes of the white renters 
are beyond their efforts at present in this area; and even more the homes 
of the white croppers. The chances are these facts are statewide, and that 
- the 317,000 people in white farm tenant homes are receiving no benefit or 
almost none from their extension efforts. 

6. Churches and Church Influences. Next to the home which is every- 
where the strongest social group in country civilization, the country church 
stands out as the most important social institution—in this territory, in 
the state, and in the South in general. | 

Eight churches of three denominations serve the 1700 white inhabitants 
of Baldwin and Williams townships. Seven have preaching once-a-month 
and usually in rotation. All but two of the preachers serving these eight 
churches are non-residents, living in other communities or counties. Only 
one preacher in the active ministry and only one retired minister are living 
in this territory. 

As in Orange, the country church buildings evidence pride and care. 
Ail but one were painted once-upon-a-time. The window lights are in, the 
blinds are on, the interiors are swept and dusted, the buildings are locked 
between preaching events, the grounds and graveyards are in order, and 
are kept so by the memorial day clean-up that features the country church 
year in mid-state Carolina, or such is the general appearance of all but 
one of the country churches. The dwellings of a country region in mid- 
state North Carolina may look dilapidated, but not the country church 
buildings as a rule. 

Preaching in the different churches makes every Sunday of the month 
a social océasion for all the people, and everybody or almost everybody 
goes to church. It is the event of the week. The great event of the year ~ 
is the revival or protracted meeting when crops are laid-by in the fall and 
the whole countryside turns out. Unhappily these church-recruiting oc- 
easions often conflict in dates. The church that offers the greatest excite- 
ment draws the largest crowds. The indifferent and the openly irreligious 
come out to the church at protracted meeting times. Even the bootleggers 
fringe the out-skirts of the crowds and not infrequently ply their trade 
within the curtilage of the churches. 

_ The rest of the year the households go to the church of their own faith 
on one Sunday; the other Sundays of the month they mingle with the 


32 How Farm Tenants Live 


congregations of other creeds, with a steadily decreasing sense of church 
differences. Wed all belong to one and the same church if it wasn’t for 
the preachers, said one farmer with a twinkle in his eye. The families of 
farm owners, renters and croppers meet and mingle on a common level on 
Sundays; they freely exchange invitations to the basket dinners of the 
family groups on the church grounds on big occasions; and on the whole 
in this area the country churches are unifying rather than separating 
social influences. 

Are these churches reaching and serving the tenants? This was the 
main inquiry of the church section of our survey schedule. The answer is, 
Yes, in the main—church attendance considered. 

It ig the rule in this corner of Chatham for every family to hitch-up or 
erank-up and go to church on Sundays—to the church of its own faith on 
one Sunday of the month and to other churches within reach on other 
Sundays. Preaching is the event of the week. It is the one chance for 
social intercourse, for talk about crops and candidates by the men and 
about babies and household ailments by the women. It is the rule of every 
renter family of both types—the kinsman and the self-help tenants almost 
without exception. The farm-owning families attend church no better 
than the renters, and there are no discoverable class differences here or 
elsewhere in this tenancy area. 

But just as we expected, the thirteen white cropper families lag behind 
in church attendance. Four of these families or nearly a third of them 
all are habitually absent from church. No way to go, church too far away, 
no clothes, they say. In three families the fathers had the smell of corn 
whiskey on their breath when our surveyor talked with them, and the entire 
household<were manifestly below the level of the neighborhood. 

So much for church attendance. The Sunday school is another story. 
Of the fifty-one tenant families, thirteen go to church but not to Sunday 
school, four families more attend neither Sunday school nor church, and 
these four families are croppers. Thirty-four percent of the renter house- 
holds and seventy-nine percent of the cropper households are not in Sunday 
school. 

The Sunday school which ought to be the strongest phase of religious 
organization is the weakest. Here as elsewhere it fails to reach the 
humbler homes—the homes of the croppers in particular. 

Tenant Church Membership. Turning from church attendance to 
church membership the tabulation is as follows: 


Ten years Non Pet. 
old and Church Church 
HOUSEHOLDS Occupants - over members members 
20) Kinsman yrenters) uke ees eee 178 83 ibe 86 
13 \Selp-helpy renters 0g Oana weal: 71 50 8 84 
LSE CROP PALST wine alae sie a rae eaite Ce 72 40 24 40 


It will be noted that church membership in white tenant families in 
this territory is in direct ratio to property ownership, stable residence, and 
community identity. Here is the reason why three-fifths of the cropper 


How Farm TENANTS Live 33 


households are outside the church, and four-fifths of them outside the 
Sunday schools. The highest ratios of church membership are in renter 
households, and the lowest in cropper households. The renter households 
are 22 and 24 points above the state average of, church membership, and 
the cropper households are 22 points below it. And it must not be for- 
gotten that one of every ten people in these white cropper households, ten 
years old and over, is illiterate, and that nearly nine times out of ten his 
education ends with the fourth school grade. Here as elsewhere in the 
South a high illiteracy ratio in white tenancy areas means a low church 
membership ratio, for two reasons: first, it is embarrassing not to be able 
to read the hymns, and to sing with the rest of the congregation; and 
second, illiterate white croppers have little or no money to put into the 
contribution boxes, and ‘‘where we kaint pay we don’t go,’’? as one 
renter expressed it. White farm tenancy in the South breeds poverty, 
‘poverty breeds illiteracy, and together these three social conditions are 
deadly menaces to the country church. Besides, they remove beyond the 
reach of the chureh the very people who most need its ministrations, or 
so as a rule. : 


34 How Farm Tenants Live 


While Renters and Croppers. 
Williams and Baldwin lownships. 
Chatham Coury, N.C 


19.24, 


Cropp ers 


} bo 


; 
; 


esters | 


[16% 


aes mk ‘iteracy Schooling Beyond Nen-Church 
opulation St.-4- Grades Membershi 
10 Years Ofd Rpvlation 10 Years og 
+ Over. 5 Years Old ~ Over 
+ Over: 


How Farm TENANTS Live 35 


7. Social Occasions and Contacts. The three hundred and twenty-nine 
families of Baldwin and Williams townships—the owners and tenants of 
both races—are scattered throughout 104 square miles of territory. Whites 
and blacks are nearly equal in number, and their farms are small, aver- 
aging less than thirty cultivated acres each. They dwell in solitary farm- 
steads with wide spaces between, and farming is by nature a solitary busi- 
ness. The unit of economic production is the family, and the father is 
the over-lord of the group, in the ancient patriarchal fashion of family 
life. He may not have his legs under his own table, as the Danes say, 
but where he sits is the head of it, and nobody in the family is in doubt 
about it. Such is the type of rural family life in Chatham county, the 
State, and the South as a whole. 

Within family groups in the country regions autocracy is the rule; be- 
tween family groups democracy is the unquestioned order. The farmer 
is the best in his own group and accounts himself equal to the best in 
any other farm group. So it is in the rural civilization of almost all the 
countries of the new world. In almost all old-world countries the farmers 
dwell together in farm villages, and the extremes of individualism are 
softened by the intimate social contacts and the common concerns of 
hamlet households. 

As a result American farmers are bred to think privately and locally 
in terms of the family and the neighborhood. They do not easily think 
in terms of the community and the commonwealth. The private-local mind 
of the farmer in the South is the ultimate obstacle to country community 
life and codperative farm enterprise; also it is the ultimate problem in 
county government and in commonwealth development. 

What, then, are the influences that tend to mitigate the overweening, 
unadjusted individualism of farm life in the field of this survey? What 
are the occasions that bring families together—in particular the families 
of tenant households? And what contacts do they have with the outside 
world? 

Our study discloses the social aloofness of the farm tenant—the 
great distances to town centers, until recently in Chatham the absence of 
improved publie highways, the rarity of telephones and motor cars—there 
are only two of each in fifty-one tenant homes, the fourth and fifth grade 
levels and limits of school culture in a majority of the families, the small 
average number of household newspapers, magazines, and books. The 
epoch-making events of the big wide world break in tiny ripples on the 
far distant shores of farm tenant lives only after many days—here and 
everywhere else in the South. 

Social contacts and social occasions in the tenant households of this 
territory consist mainly of the inter-family affairs and events of the local 
church and school neighborhoods. In the order of frequency they are (1) 
preaching days in the country churches and commencement occasions in 
the country schools, (2) mutual visits between the homes of owners and 
tenants of each race on the basis of democratic equality—assumptions of 
family superiority are almost unknown, (3) the neighborly exchange of 


36 How Farm Tenants Live 


labor in pinches produced by seasonal stresses—plowing, harvesting, 
threshing, corn shucking seasons and the like, (4) dogs, guns, and hunting 
parties—in these fifty-one tenant households there are fifty guns and 
forty-six dogs, (5) picnics which are usually school events, (6) holiday 
occasions and neighborhood gatherings, mainly during the Christmas sea- 
son—parties or sociables as they are called, (7) occasional neighborhood 
fairs, usually at the school buildings, (8) other events—barbecues, opossum 
suppers and so on, The most common entry in the schedule blanks is 
‘‘visiting, talking, telling jokes, hunting, fishing, eating, watermelons.’’ 


Practically everybody goes to church, every household hunts and fishes, 
and every family but one exchanges visits. The tenant families that have 
no part in the inter-family life of this territory are as follows: sixteen 
exchanged no labor during the year, eighteen attended no picnics, six took 
no part in holiday events, twenty-nine attended no sociables, and forty-two 
stayed away from the infrequent neighborhood fairs. No family attended 
a circus, and only one looked in at a film picture in the run of the year. 
Nowhere did we find a trace of dancing as a neighborhood event. 


Children’s plays around the home are primitive and in twenty-one 
homes they are altogether absent. Base, tag, dog-on-wood, hide-and-seek, 
cat, ball-over, stick-it-to-him, pitching horse-shoes, marbles, dolls, mud pies, 
riding sticks, red bugs, gully bugs, jack-in-the-bush, checkers, and rook 
are the home games of country children in this territory—dolls in only 
one tenant family, checkers in one, and rook in two. No cards were in evi- 
dence anywhere; but also Mother Goose is everywhere unknown. The home 
groups are too small for lively fun among the young people, and the one- 
teacher schools are too small to develop the values of team-play. Besides, 
the unconscious assumption is that children are born to work not to play. 
In listing for us the children’s games in the various homes, one tenant 
housewife said with spirit, ‘‘I wants you to understand that we works 
hereabouts; we ain’t no sportin neighborhood.’’ There is abundant sea- 
sonal leisure in farm tenant homes, but no leisure-time philosophy of life. 
Salvation for young people lies in work, and getting together for a good 
time is an evidence of mortal sin of some sort. 


‘And such is the unconscious assumption of the country churches. In 
no instance did we find any evidence that they were concerned about whole- 
some recreation in the countryside. Not social affairs in this world but 
salvation in the next world is the core of religious consciousness in our 
country regions. Rural religion is not annointed with ‘‘the oil of glad- 
_ness’’ that David prayed for. Fun and frolic are tolerated with qualms 
of conscience or viewed with vague suspicion as essentially evil. And so 
the country church resigns country recreation to the Devil and all his 
works. 

Life in solitary farmsteads, a few to the square mile, in the vast open 
spaces of America, is in itself a denial of a primary social instinet—the 
eraving for companionship, and the farm family group fails to satisfy 
this craving. As a result, lonesomeness alone plays a large part in the 
cityward drift of country populations; it plays the largest part in the 


How Farm Tenants Live Bb 


exodus of farm boys and girls in their teens. There has been a steady 
movement of country people out of Baldwin and Williams townships for 
thirty years; since 1890 the population of Baldwin had dwindled from 
2068 to 1439, and Williams has dropped from 2760 inhabitants to 1517. 
More than a third of all the people of these two townships have moved 
‘out in a single generation. Soon or late, a steady decrease in population 
produces static or stagnant social areas. Such is the net result of eco- 
nomic and social disadvantages, of life and livelihood under uninspiring 
_or dispiriting influences; and in the last analysis it is social disabilities 
that destroy values of every sort, economic, civic and religious alike— 
farm values and incomes, store business and profits, neighborhood life 
and enterprise, community morals, law and order, county government 
efficiency and church development. Such are the pressing issues of ex- 
istence for farmers and storekeepers, teachers and preachers to consider 
in Baldwin and Williams townships. More and better roads, better market 
facilities, larger cash incomes, more efficient schools and churches, more 
books, newspapers and magazines, greater attention to sanitation and 
hygiene, a braver attitude toward community morals, law and order, and 
a more intimate acquaintance with county office affairs—such are the 
foundations of a fuller life in the territory surveyed in Chatham county. 

8. Civic Consciousness. But there are comforting signs of intelligent 
appreciation of the way-out in Baldwin and Williams townships. The 
straw ballot taken in the fifty-one tenant households shows that only seven 
of the ninety-nine voters were opposed to consolidated schools, only three 
were opposed to codperative marketing, road bonds, or ‘book farming,’ 
only two thought college education a waste of time, and only two con- 
sidered themselves free, white, and twenty-one and privileged to do as they 
pleased without regard to morals, law and order. And mark this—of 
these ninety-nine voters, seventy-two are in the habit of voting regularly. 

Nineteen voters expressed positive, definite opinions about community 
- needs, and in the main they were intelligent opinions. The other eighty 
voters had no opinions—had never thought about such matters, they said. 
The unthinking and the unconcerned were the vast majority—but of such 
is the Kingdom of Democracy in free America, _ 


III 


Helping Tenants into Farm Ownership 


The fifty-one white tenants are nearly a third of all the white farmers 
in this territory, and the 102 negro tenants are nearly three-fourths of all 
the negro farmers. Ideally it is desirable for these landless farmers to 
own the land they cultivate. Civilization is rooted and grounded in the 
home-owning, home-loving, home-defending instincts. Nobody doubts this 
fundamental fact. But what is ideally desirable is not always actually 
possible, human nature considered. All these landless men need help, but 
not all of them can be helped. Many of them with judicious assistance 
could rise into farm ownership and effective citizenship; others in large 


38 How Farm TENANTS LIvE 


numbers could not be settled down in stable property ownership of any 
sort by the angel Gabriel himself; as they now are, an outright gift of 
forty acres and a mule would avail them little more than the manna sent 
down from Heaven availed the Children of Israel. 

Who Can Be Helped: (1) With rare exceptions, not many of the white 
croppers can be helped into farm ownership. They are a fourth of all the 
white tenants in Chatham, in the State, and in the South. In North Caro- 
lina they number 16,575 families, and in the main they are satisfied with 
their landless estate. The upward look into farm ownership is absent. 
As a rule they are handicapped by a lack of the homeowning virtues, 
namely (1) steady-gaited industry, (2) thrift which is the combined result 
of prudential foresight and hardy self-denial, (3) sagacity or the ability 
to think things through to wise conclusions, (4) sobriety or freedom from 
the use of intoxicating liquors, and (5) integrity—reliability, a sense of 
moral obligations, trustworthiness, and the like essential qualities of char- 
acter. Lacking these home-owning virtues or the will to develop them, no 
man on any level of life is likely to acquire property in land or to hold 
it inviolate. The hopeful white croppers are few but these few ought to 
be helped. We estimate their number to be two in Baldwin and Williams 
townships and 800 in the state-at-large. The ratio of hopefulness is right 
around one-twentieth of all the white croppers of the state. But while 
little can be done for the adults in cropper households, surely much can be 
done for the swarms of bright-faced children, before they are hardened by 
the conditions in hopeless homes. What can be done for them is a prob- 
lem for day teachers, Sunday-school teachers and preachers, home and 
farm demonstration agents, university and state college extension services. 
Here is the most insistent home mission problem in North Carolina and 
the South. . 

(2) The tenant group that offers the largest chance for effective out- 
side aid is the group of self-help renters—so called because they have 
struggled into the ownership of workstock, farm tools and implements, 
household goods and utensils, by self-effort alone, without the advantage of 
kith and kin relationships to their landlords, and without the hope of ac- 
quiring farms by inheritance, gift or marriage. This group is one-fourth 
of all the white tenants in Baldwin and Williams townships, and the 
chances are that this ratio is approximately true in the state-at-large. 
Which means some 16,600 farm families. Many of these could safely be 
lifted into the ownership of farms by judicious outside aid; but not all, 
indeed not many more than one-ninth of them all, say 2,000 all told. I 
say one-ninth because numerous field studies at the State University, and 
in various centers of research the world over of late years, show that 
something like nine of every ten people live from hand to mouth, consume 
all they produce, spend all they make, and drop inevitably into debt in 
sudden emergencies. 

(3) The kinsman tenants, the tenants whose landlords are fathers, 
uncles, fathers-in-law, and others closely related by blood or marriage ties, 
are one-half of all the white tenants in Baldwin and Williams townships, 


How Farm Tenants Live 39 


and probably in the state-at-large. For them the way ahead into owner- 
ship is usually open, by inheritance, gift or marriage or by purchase on 
favorable terms. As a class they need not be considered in any policy of 
state-aid to farm ownership. What they need is mainly (1) the will to 
be home-owning farmers on the twenty-two million idle acres held by their 
kinspeople in North Carolina, and (2) farm prosperity sufficient to allow 
the accumulation of capital enough to equip their farms with more and 
better livestock, tools and machinery. 


State-Aid to Land Ownership 


To recapitulate: the white tenants in North Carolina who possibly 
might be helped into farm ownership are 800 croppers and 2,000 self-help 
renters, or 2,800 of the 32,000 white tenants of these two classes in the 
state. State-aid policies would be directly aimed at some 2,800 white 
tenant families and figured accordingly, to say nothing of some 1,400 
worthy negro tenants. At the present average of current market prices 
for farm land in North Carolina, these 2,800 white tenants could be settled 
down on forty-acre farms of their own for $1000 apiece, or $2,800,000 all 
told. 

Where are these millions to come from? From the state treasury as an 
outright gift? Not possibly so. There is no surplus there—nor ever likely 
to be—for landless farmers however worthy. And not desirably so, even 
if there were such treasury surpluses. State-aid to landless farmers, if 
considered at all, must be considered as a straight-out business proposition, 
and conducted from first to last as a solvent business enterprise not as a 
charity. It must not be a burden on the taxpayers of the state. Jt must 
not raise anybody’s taxes by so much as a single cent, to pay either 
principal or interest. But while the state has no money to lend, it has credit 
in abundance, and this is what could be loaned to the worthy landless 
farmers of North Carolina as a state investment in character; and loaned 
not on the basis of state bonds of the kind we have heretofore issued but 
on the basis of debenture bonds issued by the state and protected by titles 
to the land bought for land settlement purposes and sold to the settlers. 
Not state bonds but debenture bonds issued by an authorized state agency 
and underwritten by the state is the business form of the proposition. 
What we are indicating is the California way, and there is no other way 
worth considering in North Carolina, in our opinion. The details in Cali- 
fornia appear in full in Helping Men to Own Farms, a small volume writ- 
ten by Dr. Elwood Mead of the University of California, executive secre- 
tary of the State Land Settlement Board, and the social engineer of the 
successful farm colonies established at Durham and Delhi. Our legisla- 
tors and thoughtful students of essential commonwealth concerns in gen- 
eral in North Carolina are referred to this book. Twenty copies of it are 
on the shelves of the seminar library of the department of rural social- 
economics at Chapel Hill and will be loaned without charge upon request. 
We therefore limit our treatment of a state-aid policy to the few words 
of these brief paragraphs. 


40 How Farm Trenants Live 


But before passing on to consider the Self-Help Agencies that already 
exist in North Carolina to serve capable ambitious tenants, we want to 
direct attention to the three essential values of the California Plan. First, 
it settles small farmers in farm communities and bases the marketing of 
farm products on community codperation. Second, it costs the state noth- 
ing but capable faithful attention on part of its executive agency. Of the 
initial $260,000 set aside in 1918 by the legislature $118,000 has already 
been paid back, and the million dollars of debenture bonds authorized are 
not only fully covered by the land titles held, but the bonds are being 
paid off by the farmers, capital and interest, in amortized payments 
running through thirty-odd years. The plan of state-credit loans is so 
successful that the Board itself opposes any further aid by the state legis- 
lature. Third, the success of the plan has demonstrated that the private 
owners of large landed estates can use the business way of it to bring their 
idle, wilderness acres into cultivation with clear advantage to the settlers 
and with guaranteed profits to the land barons. The Settlement Board is 
therefore establishing no other colonies, but is devoting itself to the larger 
policy of schooling the owners of large estates in the business details of 
a complex plan, and to training social engineers of all sorts to act as 
efficient agents of private capital employed in establishing private colonies 
of home-owning farmers. In other words, what the state cannot do, as a 
large public enterprise, the private owners of large estates are now 
clamoring to do on their own initiative as a private business venture of 
demonstrated success. Showing the how of the thing is what California 
has done, and done at almost no expense to the state. 


The initial $260,000 authorized by the California legislature for admin- 
istrative purposes would be a needlessly large sum in North Carolina. 
So because we do not have California’s problem of leveling, ditching and 
irrigating desert wastes. Fifty thousand dollars would probably be suf- 
ficient to enable a Land Settlement Board in this state to effect an or- 
ganization, to inventory the problem, to define the engineering difficulties, 
and to indicate the necessary engineering staff. And we may add that 
the difficulties are mainly technical engineering difficulties—business en- 
gineering, production and distribution engineering, and social engineering 
for farm community life, as well as civil engineering in the preparation of 
farm land for immediate productiveness. When the Board is ready for 
the business of this public enterprise, direct state appropriations cease, 


because the administration cost is transferred to the overhead account of 


a solvent business. Or so it was in California, and so it could be in 
North Carolina. Business ability and selfless public servants are not con- 
fined to California alone. We have these in abundance in North Carolina. 
Unhappily we do not have an Elwood Mead to eall into the executive 
direction of Board policies and details. There ought to be ten thousand 
Elwood Meads, for upon men of his sort the success of such public enter- 
prises mainly and finally depends. 


State-aided farm colonies in North Carolina is a question that ought 
to be thoroughly debated before final decisive action is voted, and in- 


How Farm TENANTS LiIvE 41 


telligent popular support must be aroused or the policy will fail if 
adopted. Moreover such a plan must be characterized by freedom from 
elass-legislation. It must open the way into land ownership for both 
races alike. Negro tenants need such aid less than white tenants, because 
under prevailing conditions they are acquiring farms of their own faster 
than the whites are doing in every southern state. The explanation of 
this fact is exhibited in full in The Human Way, a little volume published 
by the Southern Sociological Society, and in The University News Letter, 
Wels VIEL, No: 37. 


Perhaps the wisest approach to state-aided landownership would be 
through a state commission charged with threshing out the problem in 
North Carolina and reporting a feasible policy to the legislature two 
years hence. 


Self-Helping Agencies and Qualities 


But whether or not the state adopt California’s policy of state-aid 
for landless farmers, there are existing agencies of help for sturdy, 
capable, ambitious tenants. Our country banks, for instance, more or 
less actively encourage the thrifty by offering four percent interest on 
bank account savings. The thrifty souls of the state have more than a 
hundred million dollars in these institutions. If all our banks were as 
busy in behalf of the farmers as the First National Bank of Tarboro, 
the total of bank account savings in North Carolina could be quickly 
doubled. 


Next we have our cooperative farm credit unions. They number twenty- 
nine at present, or more than in all the rest of the United States put to- 
gether. They could be greatly increased in number and effectiveness if 
only the state authorities directly charged with codperative enterprise 
were properly bent upon realizing the intent of our cooperative credit — 
union law—the best law on this subject in the whole United States. Our 
eredit unions have largely failed of their purposes, because even more 
largely our state authorities have failed to see the need of such agencies 
in North Carolina and the potent part they might play in training farmers 
in the essentials of self-helping farm finance. 


And next, our building and loan associations. They are more numer- 
ous, more active, and more prosperous in the towns and cities of North 
Carolina than in any other Southern state; but they need to be greatly 
increased in number, membership, and resources, and to extend their oper- 
ations beyond town centers into the surrounding country regions, as in 
Ohio. A law already on our statute book authorizes this extension into 
farm areas, but our town needs are at present too great and our building 
and loan resources are too small to leave any surpluses to lend aspiring 
worthy farmers. If we can keep alive for a long term of years the 
B-and-L interest developed in North Carolina during the last twelve months, 
we can easily top the list of states in the ratio of dwellings owned by 
occupants. As it is, only one state stands ahead of us in this essential 
particular. 


42 How Farm Tenants LIvE 


These are all self-help agencies, but they avail the thrifty alone. 
Many are called into the ownership of homes and farms, but only the 
thrifty are chosen. 

Aside from these collateral social agencies, the way into landowner- 
ship lies open to farmers endowed with sagacity—with what the farmers 
eall hard horse-sense. Sagacity is the ability to think things through to 
safe conclusions. It is a personal quality that is fast developing into a 
social asset of farm community life and effort in North Carolina. Ap- 
plied to farming it concerns (1) money crops produced on a bread-and- 
meat basis; (2) it concerns the distribution of farm wealth by the farmers 
themselves in codperative marketing associations; (3) it concerns more 
and better meat and milk animals, a greater diversity of money products 
in commercial quantities, and a better balanced system of farming in the 
state at large; (4) it concerns farm industries—creameries, condenseries, 
and cheese factories, peanut cleaneries and peanut products, sweet potatoes 
prepared and stored for marketing throughout the twelve months, pork 
products—sausage, bacon, hams, shoulders, and the like—for sale by farm 
organizations in nearby or distant markets, as in Denmark, fruit packing 
and conserving plants, and so on and on. In every field of human effort— 
in farming, foresting, and mining alike—the direct producers of crude 
wealth are always at the bottom of the economic scale; it is the producers 
of finished products fit for final consumption, and the handlers of these 
products who get the bulk of the consumer’s dollar. 

It was sagacity applied to farming that. devised Wisconsin’s way out 
of bankruptcy in the eighteen eighties, and it must devise North Carolina’s 
way out of farm poverty in the nineteen twenties. Otherwise the wealth 
that farmers produce will forever fail to stick to the palms that sweat it 
out.. To the farmer that hath sagacity shall be added, and from him that 
hath it not, shall be taken away even that which he hath. This law of 
spiritual wealth works with the same fateful certainty in'the field of eco- 
nomie¢ enterprise, in town and country regions alike. Brain-sweaters have 
always lorded it over the back-sweaters. Education is the fundamental 
agency of progress, but the education that ripens into sagacity is at bot- 
tom the tenant’s only chance, no matter what social or civic agencies lie 
at hand to help him. No matter what organic and statute laws may exist, 
they exist. in vain for tenants who lack sagacity. With all their getting 
they must get what Solomon called wisdom and understanding, and it 
must be applied to farm production, farm distribution, farm wealth 
accumulation, and farm civilization in general. 


The Place of Legislation 


Nevertheless there is a proper place for legislative action in behalf of 
individual and social efforts at progress. Laws are like the retaining walls 
and the overhead arch in a tunnel through a sand bed—they support and 
preserve the results of progressive social enterprise. The tunnel would be 
impossible without the walls and the arch, and the walls and the arch 
would be useless without the tunnel. So it is in social progress of any 


How Farm TEeNANtTs Live 43 


sort. For instance, codperation as a form of business organization did 
not exist in law in any state of the Union twenty years ago. A corporation 
was a well defined legal entity and term, but a codperation in any legal 
sense did not exist. And without legal definition, sanction, and super- 
vision, a codperative enterprise based (1) on the one-man-one-vote principle 
of control and (2) on dividends rated on business done through the organ- 
ization as well as on stock owned, could not operate with either advantage 
or safety. Codperating farmers were liable to indictment in the courts. 
They could be arrested as lawbreakers and tried as criminals are tried; 
they actually were so arrested and tried here and there in the United 
States. Codperation law is just as necessary as corporation law. 


And the same thing is true of credit law and credit institutions. 
Credit is ability and willingness to pay what is due exactly when it is due. 
It is the combined result of collateral and character. Every man—farmer, 
merchant, manufacturer, whatnot—creates his own credit; it is law that 
creates and regulates credit institutions. It is the business of borrowers 
to furnish collateral; it is the business of credit institutions to furnish ac- 
commodation. What is needed is (1) long-term credit accommodation for 
farm collateral offered for long-term loans at low rates of interest, and 
Congress has created land banks and other credit agencies to meet this 
particular need of the farmers. Congress alone is able to create such 
credit institutions on the large scale necessary. Federal Land Banks exist 
but they exist in vain for farmers who cannot offer proper collateral. 
They require farm land as collateral, and they serve land-owning farmers 
not landless tenants. Less than five percent of all the millions loaned by 
the federal land banks has gone to the landless tenants of the United 
States. What the best of tenants have is character and they have little 
else. 


What worthy farm tenants need (2) is banks that capitalize character, 
and extend accommodation in personal-security loans in small amounts at 
low rates of interest running throughout the farm year. The codperative 
eredit union is the credit machinery that meets this need. It is sanctioned 
by law in some seventeen states but it has failed to develop into large 
proportions in country areas under state promotion, guidance and auditing 
supervision—even in North Carolina where its development shows the 
greatest progress in the Union. It is almost the sole hope of ‘intelligent, 
industrious, and thrifty tenant farmers—of some 2,800 worthy white 
tenants and some 1,400 worthy negro tenants in North Carolina. Farm 
credit unions are a demonstrated success in every country of Europe; 
they are a failure in every state of America. What the states have failed 
to accomplish for landless men, the federal government must undertake, 
and it needs to be undertaken promptly on a large scale. Law cannot 
ereate collateral in goods and services, but it can create the machinery 
of credit accommodation, adjusted and administered to meet the peculiar 
needs of both tenants and landowning farmers. There is still much to be 
done in the field of farm credit institutions, if farm owners are to thrive, 
and if farm tenants are to have a decent chance to rise into ownership. 


44 How Farm TENANTS Live 


Other Obstacles to Ownership 


In addition to the meager or the minus money returns to farming as a 
business in average years, there are certain obstacles in law and custom 
that paralyze the farmowner’s interest in agriculture, and at the same 
time stifle the tenant’s wish to own a farm. Farming don’t pay, Ain’t no 
money in it, If I own a farm I get taxed to death, The farmer’s got no 
chance, I can make more money in a cotton mill, I can make more money 
doin a-most anything or nothing at all in town—these are the opinions we 
ran into in the farm tenant homes of Chatham county. They give expres- 
sion to vaguely sensed facts. They are hard facts that exist in the 
country regions of Chatham county, North Carolina, and the Nation. And 
they are facts that must be reckoned with, or the day draws near when 
America will be asking, What shall we eat and wherewithal shall we be 
clothed? Already we are asking, What shall we do with the farm bloe in 
Congress and the agrarian revolt in general? 

J. The fundamental obstacle to land ownership lies in the common 
law meaning of property. It is a meaning essentially negative. It is 
based on protection for the owner against the use of his own, without his 
free consent, by anybody else. It implies no positive obligation on part of 
the owner to make any use of it himself. It is hardly thinkable that the 
term could have any other meaning when applied to personal property, but 
when applied to property in land it has a dog-in-the-manger meaning that 
imperils the safety of civilization, or so it begins to appear. By what es- 
sential right human or divine may a man retain the possession of land that 
he will not or cannot put to productive uses? He has that right in com- 
mon law, statute law, and organic law in every country of Christendom, 
but landless men are more and more beginning to question it. It is a 
question that involves more than law, it. involves both ethics and religion, 
in the opinion of Isaiah of old, who pronounced a woe on Israel for 
joining house unto house and lot unto lot. 

There are one million three hundred eighty thousand landless souls in 
North Carolina. More and more they are wondering about the one hun- 
dred thousand vacant town lots and the twenty-two million idle acres of 
farm land they look upon everywhere they turn in their home state— 
town lots and farm acres held out of productive use for speculative rises 
in value—held at prices that a full half of our people cannot afford to 


pay. What they see is land, land, everywhere and not a rood that the . 


average wage-earner or farm-tenant can buy. 

So it is in every state of the Union, with the result that the more 
populous and prosperous an area becomes the fewer are the people who 
own the houses they live in or the land they cultivate. It is Christendom’s 
eruelest paradox. And no wonder men are beginning to question the 
common law meaning of property in land. 

Estate or inheritance taxes, transfer taxes on increased sale values, 
progressive land taxes and the like are social ways of calling into question 
the rights of private property in land—in Belgium and Denmark, in 


eS ee ee - a ee al 


How Farm Tenants Live 45 


Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Soon or late we 
shall have to resort to such remedies in America in behalf of the steadily 
increasing multitude of landless men. Students interested in this question 
are referred to Howe’s Privilege and Democracy in America, Ghent’s 
Benevolent Feudalism, Yetta Scheftel’s The Taxation of Land Values, 
Rowntree’s Land and Labor in Belgium, and Lusk’s Social Welfare in New 
Zealand. The list is long, and these are just a few of the books that are 
best worth thumbing thoughtfully. 


2. The second obstacle to land ownership lies in the heavy penalties 
laid on productive home and farm owners by the prevailing tax system of 
America. They are penalties so heavy that taxes, interest, repairs and 
insurance combined force the average man to rent rather than to own a 
farm or a home of his own. It is a tax system that imposes light or 
relatively light burdens on unimproved town lots and farm lands, and 
heavy burdens on lots and farms put to productive uses by enterprising 
owners. It is a system that rewards the inactive owner of idle lots and 
lands and punishes the wage-earner who buys a home or the tenant who 
buys a farm. The minute he ceases to be a tenant and becomes a home or 
a land owner, the taxgatherer darkens his door. For instance, the renters 
and croppers in the farm regions of North Carolina pay no taxes of any 
sort whatsoever, to the county, the state, or the federal government. Or 
so as a rule, because they own no land, and no personal property beyond 
the exemption of $300 per household. They no longer pay poll taxes as a 
condition of voting. They pay no state income tax because they have no 
income beyond the exemption of $2000 per family head and no federal 
taxes because they have no incomes beyond the exemption of $2,000 per 
family head. In the area surveyed only eleven of the fifty-one tenant farm- 
ers are on the township tax lists. Forty of them are as tax-free as the 
birds of the air. But the minute any one of these forty buys a farm he 
pays county taxes on the full value of his purchase or so much of it as the 
assessor wills, no matter how little the new owner may have paid on his 
little farm, or how much he may still owe. He improves his property and 
increases its value, whereupon the assessor increases its tax value and calls 
for more taxes. The more industrious he is the heavier his tax burden be- 
comes. So it is everywhere under the uniform ad valorem tax system—the 
general property tax system of this and other states, a system that has been 
abolished for state support in North Carolina, but that still remains the 
basis of county and municipal taxation. One may well doubt the essential 
righteousness of a tax system that rewards inactivity and punishes 
industry, thrift, and enterprise. 


As a result the wage earners in our cities and the farm tenants in our 
country regions tell you that it is cheaper to rent than to own homes and 
farms. And it is true almost everywhere in America. But what a pity 
it is! And how direful the menace to home life and responsible citizenship 
—to the foundations of national sanity, security, and stability! 


46 How Farm Tenants Live 


Constructive Suggestions 


In behalf of aspiring, capable, worthy tenants in the town and country 
regions of North Carolina, we offer the following recommendations—not 
so much for immediate adoption as for popular discussion aimed at changes 
in the tax laws of the state as rapidly as practical wisdom may dictate. 
The people of North Carolina cannot erect a stable commonwealth on the 
landless estate of men, and the sooner we face this fundamental truth the 
better. 

For lack of space we are stating without discussing these recommenda 
tions. 

First, we recommend constitutional changes that will permit the classi 
fication of property values and the tax rates thereon; which means the 
. definite abandonment for all purposes of the ancient general property 
tax. For an excellent discussion of the general property tax see McPher- 
son’s chapter in the 1908 volume of the International Tax Association. 

Second, the separate listing of real estate and the improvements thereon 
in both town and country areas; the rates on improvements to be made 
low enough to encourage and reward industry and enterprise. 

Third, definitely low tax rates on homes occupied by the owners and on 
farms operated by the landlords thereof; definitely higher tax rates on 
unused or unimproved town lots and farm lands; and still higher rates on 
such lots and farm lands when owned by residents of other states and 
countries. Which means, progressive land taxes—beginning with low 
rates on small properties occupied or used for productive purposes by the 
owners thereof, followed by rates gradually increasing acording to acreage 
or value, with higher rates laid on unused, unimproved town lots and farm 
lands, and with the highest rates laid on such unused property when held 
by alien landlords. 

The progressive land tax has been in force in New Zealand for thirty 
years. It took a score of years to put it on the law books of that country, 
and it will take a century or so to make it effective in bringing idle town 
lots and farm acres into productive use; so difficult is it to choke out of 
men the purely speculative interest in land ownership. 

Such a law will be slow to get on the tax books of any state or country 
of the western world, and it will be slower still in accomplishing its pur- 
pose—namely, to give landless men a chance to own homes to live in and 
farms to cultivate. But we might as well begin to discuss it now in 
North Carolina. 

Fourth, the taxing of the equities and nothing but the equities of home 
and farm owners, when the properties are occupied or operated by the 
owners themselves. As it is now, the owners of five-to-twenty-year 
mortgages amounting to $3000 or less are exempt from taxation in North 
Carolina, provided these mortgages cover money loaned to buy homes and 
call for 5 percent interest or less. If we can exempt the owners of such 
mortgages, surely we can exempt the owners of such homes from tax on 
the property covered by these mortgages. 


} 
a 
fi 


How Farm TENANTS LIVE 47 


The manifest purpose of these constructive suggestions is to encourage 
the increase of owned homes, farms, and productive businesses of every type, 
(1) by minimizing the tax burdens of small homeowners and small farmers 
and giving them a decent chance to hold their homes and farms, (2) by 
laying a penalty on the owners of idle lots and farms, (3) by encouraging 
enterprise with lower rates on real estate improvements and investments, 
and (4) by penalizing acquisitive capital of the miserly type and reward- 
ing productive capital invested in active enterprises in North Carolina. 

Fifth, a State Land Settlement Board, charged (1) with investigating 
the California plan of establishing farm colonies, and (2) reporting a 
feasible plan of state-aid to capable farm tenants in North Carolina. 
With 100,000 vacant city lots, twenty-two million acres of idle farm land, 
and one million three hundred and eighty thousand landless, homeless 
people, town and country, it is high time we were considering proposed 
remedies of any sort whatsoever. 


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